


The Queen of Unintended Consequences

by Terri Botta (Isilwath)



Series: The Royalty Series [1]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Dark, Gen, Not a Happy Story, alternate season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 13:34:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 66,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13660059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isilwath/pseuds/Terri%20Botta
Summary: What happens when a vampire gives up, gives in, and gives the girl exactly what she wants.





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> This is an AU fic that takes place in an alternate Season 3. I posted it to FF. net in August of 2012. Didn't realize I'd never posted it here. I’m going to warn you. This is NOT a fluffy romance story. I’m not even sure it’s a D/E story. Damon’s angry and he’s had enough. Elena is going to have to live with the consequences of her actions.
> 
> Much love to my betas Lisa Morgan and Glamoured-by-Eric
> 
> Setting the stage:
> 
> Episodes 1 and 2 have happened as they were aired, but Episodes 3 and 4 are switched. Ric telling Damon to take a beat with Elena, and the Founder’s Party where Damon kills Ric and attacks Bill Forbes all happen BEFORE Damon and Elena go to Chicago to find Stefan. In this AU, Gloria performs the blood ritual on Stefan, but Katherine does not interrupt the truth spell and kill her. She is able to juju the truth about Elena being alive and her blood being the key to solving Klaus’s hybrid troubles. 
> 
> Everyone with me? Okay, here we go. Hold on. It gets bumpy from here.

Chapter One

 

It began with a conversation. Most things usually do. A conversation involving words which precipitate actions based on those words. It’s part of the decision process: weighing what was said, considering the options, and then trying to decide on the best course of action based on what was known and available.

This decision process was no different for Damon Salvatore, except that it usually involved trying to figure out how to keep the important people in his life alive while minimizing collateral damage.

It wasn’t as easy as he made it look, especially when said people actively undermined his efforts and even tried to circumvent them. It also didn’t help that the very people he was trying to protect seemed hell-bent on pissing him off. Ric telling him to take a beat from Elena, and Elena getting all high-and-mighty with him at the Founder’s party – she even thought spiking the town’s water supply with vervain was a good idea! Help him keep himself in control? Seriously? That certainly didn’t help their case any. He was a 170-year old vampire, and no one – especially an 18-yr old girl, even one he loved – told him what to do. No one.

For sure, killing Ric hadn’t been the smartest thing in the world to do, and he did sort of regret it, but they’d needed a reminder that he wasn’t a tame vamp like his brother. Although Stefan was anything but tame these days. The point was that both of them – all of the little Mystic Falls Scooby Gang actually – kept looking for Stefan in him, and they kept missing who **_he_** was. They didn’t **_see_** him. They never saw **_him_**. All they saw was another vampire who sort of did what they asked; who maybe, if Elena batted her eyes in just the right way, they could get him to play along. But they never understood what was really going on, that he was giving them the illusion of control. They thought they had him on their leash, but in reality he was never tethered at all.

The debacle of the Founder’s party, where the people he had come to trust and consider friends, ganged up on him, all but accusing him of needing to be kept under control and turned into his brother, grated on him in ways that made him angry and resentful. It proved that, even after everything he had done all summer to help Elena and keep her safe, even after acting as werewolf bait to draw the threat away from Ric and Elena in Tennessee, they still saw him as a monster who couldn’t be trusted. 

The truth hurt a lot more than he thought it would, and the betrayal cut deep. So maybe he shouldn’t have killed Ric… or attacked Bill Forbes, but, hey, they obviously expected it of him and who was he to disappoint? Why should he act like a man when all they saw was the monster? Why put up with all the judgment and recriminations and orders when there was no reward?

Of course, the real tragedy in all of this was that they were missing the point. Damon was loyal to those who were loyal to him. (Hello! Pined after a self-serving bitch who never loved him for 145 years!) He didn’t have many friends. He was a dick after all and most people wouldn’t put up with that – but what friends he did have, he cherished. If they treated him well and kept faith with him, there was almost nothing he wouldn’t do for them. In all their looking for Stefan in the elder Salvatore, they were completely ignoring the man who would have followed them to the ends of the Earth if they’d just stopped stabbing him in the back.

With everything that was going on with the Council, and Stefan, and the threat of Klaus finding out Elena was still alive, discovering that his “friends” were anything but was enough to make him want to throw up his hands, give them all two one-finger salutes and head for greener pastures. The only thing that kept him from doing so was his irrational fear that Klaus would decide to bring Stefan back to Mystic Falls and find the doppelganger still breathing, and no matter how much he had tried to kill the feelings he had for Elena, he couldn’t stop loving her and he’d do anything to keep her safe.

It was a no-win situation for him, and it was driving him nearly out of his mind. Normally, he would call Andie and lose himself in her for a few hours, but Stefan had killed Andie – a little fact that Elena seemed to be all too happy to sweep under the rug. It was okay that Stefan killed his girlfriend. She wasn’t a **_real_** girlfriend like Elena was to Stefan. She was a fake, compelled girlfriend so it was okay that Stefan had made her jump to her death. Apparently killing someone didn’t count as murder when Saint Stefan did it. It only counted when Damon killed someone, then it was all “you’re a psychopathic murder with no redeeming qualities.” Until he was needed, or dying, then all would be forgiven, until the next time he did something to piss the perfect Elena off. Really what sane person who wasn’t a hopeless masochist would put up with this shit?

It was in this dour, fuck-it-all frame of mind that he found himself when his phone buzzed and announced an unknown caller just as he had poured himself the first of what he’d hoped would be many drinks. Enough to drown his sorrows for a few minutes, or at least dull them long enough for him to see a clear path around the reeking piles of crap he was trying to navigate through.

“You’re interrupting my drink,” he growled, raising the glass to his lips.

“You miss me?”

 _‘Katherine.’_ Just what he needed to make his little circle of Hell complete. “Katherine,” he sighed. “Where are you?”

“Lurking outside your window, pining away,” she answered coyly, chuckling.

“What do you want?” He really was not in the mood to play her games. He was raw and on edge enough as it was.

“I’m homesick. What have I missed?”

“Well, Stefan’s still Klaus’s little prisoner, and Elena still thinks she can save him… and no one’s thought about you since you left,” he replied, adding the dig on purpose.

He took a drink, letting the familiar burn ground and center him. When dealing with Katherine, you had to bring your A-Game, and for that he needed to be focused. Everything she said had two, sometimes three, different meanings and had to be run through the self-centered, self-serving bitch filter.

“And what about you? I’m sure now that you’ve given up on your brother, you’re plotting some sort of way of moving in on his girlfriend.”

Her voice was a sultry purr, but he wasn’t going to stroke that kitty. No how. No way.

“I didn’t give up on him. I just don’t know where he is,” he answered tersely.

“Hm.”

Her reply, and the indulgent silence that followed, told him everything he needed to know. He could almost see the smug smile on her face, and he wanted to rip it off.

“But you do. Are you trailing them?” he questioned, dangling the tease out for her to grab.

“A hybrid who wants me dead and a sidekick who’s off the rails? I couldn’t be further away.”

 _‘Yeah, right.’_ “Which means you know exactly where they are.”

“All I know is that Klaus pitched a fit once his hybrids didn’t work, and now he’s looking for some answers.”

She was matter-of-fact now. All business and it made his ears perk up. There was a message there, he just needed to decipher it.

“How do you know that?” he pressed, not really wanting to play her game, but knowing if he didn’t give her at least a little of what she was hunting for she’d take her toys and go home.

“You spend 500 years running, and there’ll be a few people along the way that are looking out for you.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Looking out for my brother?” he asked, unable to keep the cruel edge of betrayal out of his voice.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m conflicted.”

Okay, that was enough. He was losing his patience, and she was interrupting his drinking time. Drinking time that he was spending alone because Ric wouldn’t drink with him after the whole snapping-his-neck thing. Some people were just way too sensitive. _‘But yet they expect me to take whatever shit they dish out at me, and I’m just supposed to deal with it because I’m the “evil” vampire.’_

“Where are they?” he demanded.

“So impatient. One would think you aren’t having any fun having Elena all to yourself.”

As always, she knew what targets to aim at, but he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d scored a hit 

“Where. Are. They,” he snarled.

“Okay, fine. I’ll give you a hint. Klaus dragged them to see an old friend. A dark-skinned, white-haired witch he used to run with in the 20’s,” she replied with a petulant huff.

“Gloria,” he deduced in a second. Powerful voodoo witch, but boy could she sing. He’d kept track of her over the years, and he knew that she was still in Chicago, only now she owned her own bar.

What was it with witches and bars? Bree had owned a bar. A number of other witches he knew also owned bars. There was something about the profession that drew them; probably the ability to meet with lots of people in a setting where no one tended to look twice at who was associating with whom. He’d found that all the real witches he knew either owned bars or plant nurseries, and all the new age witchy-wannabes were the ones who owned occult shops that sold tarot cards and spell components. He preferred the bars. They smelled so much better.

“Gotta go. All this running is making me peckish,” Katherine teased, bringing him out of his musings just as the line went dead.

After she hung up, Damon considered his options. Obviously, a road trip was in order just to make sure Katherine was telling the truth, and maybe he could have chat with Gloria to get an idea as to what Klaus was up to. She’d always liked him, and he felt that she might help him rescue his brother if he could get her on his side.

However, it was the worst time to find Stefan, especially an off-the-rails Stefan. With the Council breathing down on them, threatening to spike the town’s water supply with vervain, and Bill Forbes running around – uncompulsible and unkillable - playing the role of a middle-aged, unattractive Van Helsing, adding an unpredictable, strung-out-on-human-blood Stefan to the mix was a recipe for ultimate disaster.

Still, part of him wanted to court that disaster, to toss a truly wild card into the mix, and remind the naïve town of Mystic Falls what a real hunting vampire was like. Elena thought **_he_** was the aberration, not bunny-munching Stefan and his blonde, bagged blood drinking protégé. Ric had deluded himself into thinking he was some sort of super vampire hunter who stood a chance against a real seasoned killer who wanted him dead, and Bitchy Witchy was stupid enough to believe her little migraine trick would work on multiple vamps at once or even one blood-crazed vampire hell-bent on eating her. The Council, of course, was a clueless joke even **_with_** Bill Forbes leading the anti-vampire charge. If a real threat like the tomb vampires were to come into town, the streets would run red with blood, and the hapless citizens of Mystic Falls would be helpless to defend themselves against the onslaught.

His protecting the town and its inhabitants had done them a disservice. It had made them complacent and overconfident. Maybe it was time for him to rescind his protection and let them deal with an active predator on their own for once, and a Ripper at that because he had no doubts that his brother had returned to his old dine and dismember ways. Maybe it was time to show Elena the real Stefan and not the vegetarian, brooding stick-in-the-mud he’d been for the last fifty years.

The whole lot of them needed a wake-up call. They needed to realize that he was not the one who needed to be controlled. He was not the one they could tell what to do or try to mold into the image of someone he was not. He’d played the marionette, dancing to their tune, letting them think they had the ability to order him around. Well, now he was cutting the strings. Yesterday had been the last straw. He was **_not_** Stefan, and he wasn’t going to turn himself into Stefan, not for Elena, not for anyone.

Maybe they needed to learn that his not being Stefan was a **_good thing._**

He entertained the idea of going to Chicago, kidnapping his brother, dragging him back to Mystic Falls, and dropping him on Elena’s doorstep with a jaunty sayonara. That lasted all of two minutes as his overactive imagination supplied the gory details of what a Ripper Stefan would do to her. He might be royally pissed off at her and Ric for the crap they pulled, but he wouldn’t wish the tortures his off-the-rails brother would inflict upon a victim on anyone, least of all the girl he loved. And Stefan would **_hurt_** Elena. Damon knew it with complete certainty, because Stefan still **_loved_** Elena, and you always hurt the ones you love the most.


	2. Chapter Two

Chapter Two

 

It was a twelve hour drive to Chicago. Damon debated going alone, but discarded that idea, then he debated who to ask to go with him. Of the two people he sort-of trusted – decidedly less than he did 48 hours ago –, one wasn’t speaking to him, so that left Elena as the only other option. The idea of spending 12 hours in the car with the girl he loved more than anything in the world was both appealing and horrifying. It really depended on which Elena came along for the ride. If it was Time Out For Five Minutes Elena, the one who knew how to smile and laugh and drink and flirt, and who didn’t treat him like a dog she could yank on the collar and smack in the face with a newspaper to get him to “behave,” then they would have a great trip. If it was You Can’t Act Like This, Damon! Not In This Town, Not Around Me! Elena, then he might end up forgetting how much he loved her and drive his Camaro right into Lake Michigan once they got Chicago.

Nah, he loved his car too much to do that. It was a Classic, and he knew how to fix it himself. How many people could say that of their cars these days? These new ones that were more computer than muscle machine? The day he had a car he had to hook up to a laptop to diagnose a problem would be a sad, sad day indeed.

He guessed that it would probably be a bit of both Elenas who came along on the trip. Five Minute Elena would come out to play for a while until she felt too guilty for having fun without Stefan, then Not Around Me! Elena would emerge to metaphorically nail him in the balls for existing and being there when her saintly boyfriend was not. She’d spend the whole trip Jekyll-and-Hyde-ing him, and he’d spend it alternately wishing he could kiss her or set her on fire. Which pretty much summed up their entire “relationship” in a nutshell, so there was no use angsting over it.

He snuck into her bedroom just before 6am when the sun spilled its early light on her bed and on her sleeping figure. Watching her peaceful, lovely face, he felt the loss of the closeness he had once shared with her, and he mourned it like he would an aging human friend. Forty-eight hours ago, before the Founders Party, and her and Ric’s betrayals, he would have slipped into bed with her and teased her with playful banter full of sexual innuendo just to see her get flustered. But that was then and this was now, so he opted to lean over her and whisper in her ear instead.

“Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”

She came awake with a gasp and reared up so fast she almost whacked him in the jaw with her head, but he veered back in time to avoid the collision and the resulting split lip.

“Agghhh! What are you doing? Get out!” she yelled at him, gathering her sheets to cover her chest like a blushing, untouched virgin. He knew better, and she knew he knew better. If only she knew how much he knew better when he would listen as she and his brother swapped bodily fluids within full hearing range of his bedroom.

“My, my, someone is cranky this morning. Maybe I shouldn’t have interrupted your beauty rest,” he quipped, smirking.

“Ugh,” she complained and fumbled for the clock next to her bed. “Six am? Seriously? Do you really have nothing better to do at six am?”

He shrugged and stood up straight. “Fine, don’t come with me to bring Stefan home. See ya.”

That got her attention and she scrambled after him, reaching out to prevent him from leaving her bedroom. As if her fragile, human bones would last a second against him if he chose to use his strength.

“Wait… wait wait wait. What? What are you talking about? Where is he?” she stammered, shaking off the last of the sleep from her brain.

“Windy City,” he answered.

“He’s in Chicago?”

He nodded. “Yep.”

“How do you know?” she demanded, her brow furrowing.

“A little birdie told me. Start packing,” he replied, motioning to her dresser. There was a time when he would have rifled through her underwear drawer just to tease her, but not anymore. Still, he eyed the top drawer longingly, his fingers itching to dig into the silk and lace lingerie he knew she kept in there.

“Seriously, Damon, how do you know Stefan’s in Chicago?” she said, leveling him with a look that told him she wasn’t moving until he answered to her satisfaction.

He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Katherine called me last night. Klaus is having hybrid problems, and he dragged Stefan to see an old witch friend he knew in Chicago back in the 20’s.”

“Katherine called you to tell you where Stefan is? And you believe her?”

“She’s a self-centered, self-serving bitch, but she also has a keen sense of self-preservation. It’d be just like her to keep tabs on the Original Were-Vamp and my baby bro.”

“So you think she’s telling the truth?” she pressed, moving to the edge of her bed. Her face was open and honest, and he felt his heart lurch in his chest.

“Let’s just say that if she was going to spin us a tall tale to send us on a wild goose chase, she wouldn’t do it by telling us to go see a voodoo witch in Chi-town.”

She considered his words, then nodded, getting out of bed and moving to her dresser.

“Did she say if Stefan was okay?” she asked in a small voice.

“She didn’t mention him specifically, but I doubt he’s there to meet Oprah.”

He saw her pause and swallow before she gave him a short nod. He nodded back. He watched her for a moment as she started opening drawers, but then the silence between them became too heavy and he knew he had to go.

“You have ten minutes or I leave without you. I’ll be downstairs,” he told her, breezing out of her room and going down the stairs. Ric was in the living room sleeping on the couch, but he woke up when Damon walked in.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Ric demanded, sitting up.

“Nothing to worry about, Ric. Just taking Elena on a little road trip to rescue my blood-crazed brother from Klaus.”

“You’re what?” the history teacher blurted.

“What part of that did you not understand?”

Ric gave him a scathing look then headed upstairs without word. Damon cocked his head to listen to the coming conversation, a smile on his lips.

“What is this about you going with Damon?” he heard Ric ask in a worried tone.

“He woke me up this morning and told me Katherine told him Klaus and Stefan are in Chicago.”

“Katherine? And you believe him?”

He could almost see her shrug.

“After the catastrophe of the last full moon, we’ve had no other leads. I have to trust him enough to believe that he wouldn’t lie to me about something like this,” she said and her words of faith warmed him a little bit.

“Elena…”

“Look, I know yesterday was a disaster…”

“Disaster? He killed me Elena!”

“I know! I know, and that was wrong, and I’m still furious with him for it, and for what he did to Caroline’s dad. But it’s **_Stefan_** , Ric. I have to go. If there’s any chance…”

He could hear her pleading. She was trying to make the history teacher understand, but all Damon heard was her insistence that she was doing it for Stefan. Of course she was doing it for Stefan. Why would she do it for any other reason? Everyone always did things for Stefan, to protect Stefan, to save Stefan, himself included.

Why couldn’t someone choose him? Just once? He knew he was a dick, but he wasn’t a dick all the time. In fact, there were plenty of times when he **_wasn’t_** a dick at all. He blamed Stefan. Stefan had always had a way of bringing out the asshole in him… after they were turned that is. Before they were turned, before Katherine, they’d loved each other as much as two brothers could. Damon had loved his brother fiercely, protected him from the harsh hand of their father, and did everything he could to shield Stefan from the evils in the world. Evils he had seen and been repulsed by; evils no sane man should ever have to bear witness to.

And perhaps that was the biggest reason why Stefan had turned out the way he did. Never able to control his own impulses as a human, coddled and spoiled by his father and elder sibling, Stefan had never learned how to temper his desires. Once vampirism had heightened all of those needs and wants to a fever pitch, his brother couldn’t handle it and went off the deep end into Ripperdom. It was one more burden Damon had to bear in his long list of sins, but that one he had borne because he’d loved too much and not too little. It seemed that had always been his problem.

“Look, I have tried to be supportive. When you asked me to go with you to Tennessee, I was stupid enough to agree, and I called Damon because I knew we’d need the back-up. But I can’t support you running off with an unstable vampire to rescue another, even more unstable vampire from an Original unkillable werewolf-vampire hybrid,” Alaric was saying, and Damon scowled. He silently willed the man to shut up. There was no need for Elena to know the extent of the carnage Stefan had wrought. They had agreed not to discuss it in her presence or give her any details.

“Damon told me Stefan can be saved!” he heard her insist, an edge of desperation in her voice. “He told me he saw it on the mountain when Stefan wouldn’t let him die.”

“And you didn’t see the bodies in the houses Damon took me to!” Ric snapped back. “Stefan is out of control! I hate to say it, but he’s worse than Damon! No matter what Damon has done, he didn’t rip his victims apart, paint the walls with their blood, then put them back together like some twisted scene out of a bad horror film.”

Elena gasped and he could hear her breath hitching on unshed tears. “You never told me any of that…”

“I was trying to protect you, Elena! Like I’m trying to protect you now. Don’t go to Chicago. Let Damon go to Chicago and try to rescue his insane brother. Forget about Stefan. Forget about vampires. Leave it all behind and live a normal, teenage life for godsakes!”

He heard a zipper closing, probably on her gym bag, the blue one with the black stripes.

“I can’t, Ric. I just can’t,” she answered, and Damon heard the little sob that escaped her throat as she ran out of the bedroom and hurried down the stairs.

“Six minutes. I’m impressed,” he commented with his trademark smirk as she ran to him.

“I’m ready. Let’s go,” she answered harshly, her jaw set and her eyes downcast.

He gave her a sympathetic look that he knew she didn’t see and fought himself from reaching out to comfort her. She didn’t want his comfort, not now, probably not ever again.

He raised his gaze to see Ric coming down the stairs, but said nothing as the man came into the living room. Not for the first time he was glad Junior Gilbert was such a deep sleeper because the last thing they needed in this little soap opera scene was adding Elena’s baby bro to the cast.

“You take care of her. You keep her safe,” the human man commanded, and Damon didn’t bother to shove the idiocy of trying to order a 170-year old vampire around back into his face. “Even if that means throwing her over your shoulder and carrying her bodily out kicking and screaming.”

“Ric!” Elena gasped.

“She gets hurt and I’ll kill you. I promise.”

He wanted to say that he knew Ric would kill him now if he could, and that he understood. Ric loved Elena too, in his own way, and he was just trying to protect her from the monsters that lurked in the night. It was too bad that she loved one of them, and was loved by two. Three if he counted Blondie.

“Now, now, Ric. Don’t get all sentimental on me,” he taunted. “I might think you still care.”

“Dick,” Ric snapped.

He smirked his best smirk. “Always.”

He turned his eyes to Elena, who spared him a glance that was both pleading and accusing, before he spun on his heel and led the way out of the house. He didn’t need to look back to know she was following, his own Eurydice to his Orpheus.

 


	3. Chapter Three

Chapter Three

 

Elena was fingering the necklace Stefan had given her and maintaining a tense silence. It was obvious to him that Not Around Me! Elena was out in force, which was a shame because he had all kinds of games he and Five Minutes Elena could play to pass the time. The road was open and the sun was shining; his Camaro was purring along happily, his favorite music pumping through the speakers, and he was in a good mood. Being alone with Elena, able to look his fill of her and smell her beloved scent so close to him, always sent him to his happy place, but it would be even better if she quit the silent treatment.

“I sure hope we find him, coz it would suck if the last memento of Stefan was that crappy, old necklace,” he taunted because she was staring out the window and brooding.

“It’s an antique, Damon. Like you,” she replied, her snark out in full force.

“Hmmm,” he said, then opted for Plan B. He’d anticipated Not Around Me! Elena, and he had come prepared with appropriate reading material. He’d waffled about giving her the diary, but the more of a bitch she became the less guilt he felt.

“Read this. It paints a pretty, little picture of Stefan’s first experience in Chicago,” he told her, offering her the old, yellowed journal.

She took it from him, took one look at the handwritten pages, and snapped it shut. “It’s Stefan’s diary. I’m not going to invade his private thoughts,” she refused, giving him a reproachful glare.

“You need to be prepared for what you are about to see,” he insisted.

“I’ve seen Stefan in his darkest periods. I can handle it.”

He wanted to pull over just so he could laugh in her face without wrecking the car. She had absolutely no clue what she was about to walk into, and she was adamant about not letting him prepare her. Well, he had to, because if they were going into what he thought they were going into, she had to be ready or they would both end up very permanently dead. He grabbed the diary from her before she could toss it into the backseat and braced it on the steering wheel. Keeping one eye on the road, he chose a random spot in the diary and opened it to that page.

“Here’s one. March 12, 1922. I’ve blacked out days. I wake up in stranger’s blood in places I don’t recognize, with women I don’t remember.” He gasped dramatically and gave her a wide-eyed look. “I’m shocked! Stefan’s not a virgin!”

“Eyes on the road, Grandma,” she accused and snatched the diary from his hands.

He resisted gloating because he’d gotten her to do what he’d wanted and looked out at the highway and the other traffic on the road. “Fine. Back to my game. Tell me if you see a Florida plate.”

xxxxxxx

They spent the next few hours not speaking. Elena read the diary while he listened to either the radio or his iPod. One of the few upgrades he’d installed in the Camaro was a new stereo with an aux port that could take an electronic music player. God, he loved technology. It was amazing to be able to store thousands of songs and hours’ worth of music on a little, handheld device the size of a pack of playing cards.

At one point, Elena closed the diary, her face troubled, and he wondered if she would try to talk to him about what she had read, but she didn’t. Instead she turned her back to him, curling on the seat. He reached behind him and pulled up the pillow he had stashed back there, handing it to her.

“Here. Might make you more comfortable,” he said.

She gave him a wary look, as if she expected the pillow to be sinister in some way, then she accepted the offering with a murmured “thanks.” He shrugged and brushed it off.

“Can’t have you falling asleep in a bad position and waking up all knotted and cranky.”

She made a face, then wedged the pillow between the seat and the window, and turned her back once again. He heard her fall asleep about twenty minutes later, and he lowered the volume on the stereo to a threshold that was perfectly audible to his ears but not to hers.

He tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, softly singing along while Elena slept, and he indulged in some wistful fantasy that the girl beside him was his, and that they were going on an adventure together instead of chasing after his psychotic Ripper brother. It was easy to imagine when she was peaceful in sleep and not glaring daggers at him every time he said the wrong thing. She felt something for him; he knew she did, but it was buried under the mountains of guilt and confusion about Stefan. He’d almost gotten her to admit it when he’d challenged her after they’d returned from their disastrous trip to Tennessee. He’d seen it in her eyes, how much she cared about him, and how much she had come to accept him in her life. If Stefan rejected her in Chicago, and they both lived to tell the tale, he might have a chance with her if he stuck around long enough for her to get over the break-up.

If she did try to give them a chance, he knew he would have to get her out of Mystic Falls if they were ever to have any hope of making it. Too many of her friends were not on his side, and he knew they would actively try to break them up. It looked like Ric was already trying to stave any budding relationship between him and Elena off at the pass if his little “take a beat” comments were any indication. No, very few people in Mystic Falls would be happy if Elena Gilbert decided to try the other Salvatore brother on for size.

That was okay. It was a big world, and he would take her anywhere and everywhere. He would show her everything and experience places he’d been to over and over through her eyes as she saw them for the first time. He pictured him and Elena on a beach in Costa Rica. He was sure she would look amazing in a bikini. Or maybe he’d take her to New York or L.A. or Europe, and they’d sightsee and shop, and he’d fill himself up on her laughter and excitement, then they would retire to a luxury penthouse suite with a view of the skyline and a huge King-size bed...

He derailed that train-of-thought the moment his jeans got tighter and reminded himself that she was still his brother’s girl (for now.) That always put a crimp in his style, but it brought him back to reality, or at least to safer daydreams.

He was still a little angry with himself for letting his imagination run amok when the Goo Goo Doll’s _‘One Night’_ started crooning through the speakers. When the lead singer reached the line where he sang, ‘And we’ve got one night to let the whole world know, just how perfect we can be, just close your eyes and then you’ll see,-’ he angrily turned off the stereo and stewed in unrequited frustration. There were times when his desperate love for her still made him feel like his heart had been put through a blender.

He knew it was his fault. He didn’t **_have_** to love her. He could just turn it off and go on his merry way. The problem was he didn’t **_want_** to turn it off. He was tired of feeling empty; like nothing mattered and the world – and life – was a barren wasteland of nothingness that stretched on into eternity. Young vampires like Isobel reveled in the lack of feeling, but she had been less than a decade old. In time she would have learned that the nothingness was worse than letting herself feel, just like he had discovered after a century of wandering, lost, through the emotional desert. In the end, he’d had to turn it back on otherwise the nothing would have consumed him.

The intense emotions he now felt, the wild roller coaster of rage and love and pain and joy, were better than not feeling anything at all, and if he could just handle the constant whiplash from the ups and downs, he’d be okay. It was the reverse corkscrews that always threw him for a loop. They made him wish he could go back to the nothing, at least for a little bit until he got his bearings again, but he found actually flipping the switch almost impossible. It was times like those when he wondered if Rose had been right; that there really **_was_** no switch, and that, as he got older, he wouldn’t be able to flip it at all.

Elena made a sleepy little sound beside him, something somewhere between a sigh and snore, and he wondered if she was dreaming. She turned in the seat and the seatbelt caught the edge of her shirt, pulling it down some to expose the cup of her pale blue bra, and his eyes were drawn immediately to the lace trim and the delicate curve of her breast. He licked his lower lip and marveled at the changes in women’s lingerie over the last few decades.

Modern ladies underwear was nice, and easy to remove, and the women of this time didn’t know how good they had it. In 1864, women were expected to wear layers upon layers of clothes with corsets and petticoats and underskirts all in addition to the heavy, wide-skirted dresses that were the fashion of the times. Men salivated over a glimpse of an ankle and fantasized about reaching under the skirts to discover what treasures were hiding underneath. Getting to those treasures through all the layers of gingham and cotton could sometimes be a challenge (but fun, too, in the right setting,) but the rewards were worth it.

He hadn’t been a virgin when he’d met Katherine. Nearly no war veteran was. Groups of “camp-followers” trailed the troops, knowing the battle scarred soldiers would be desperate for the distractions they had to offer, and the virginal young men would be in need of a little female comforting on the eve of their first battle. He’d partaken of their offerings at the urging of David Skinner who had joined the regiment the same month as he, and they’d shared many of the same women until David had gotten his head blown to bits by a Yankee musket shot. Damon had been right next to him, and he saw the back half of his friend’s skull explode outward.

He’d deserted the army the very next day, longing for home and his sanity. Instead he’d found Katherine. She’d been the single most stunning thing his war-worn eyes had ever seen, and he hadn’t cared one whit that she fancied his brother. Stefan hadn’t seen the horrors he’d witnessed. Stefan was an innocent, and Katherine was no wilting flower. He’d needed Katherine more than Stefan, and for once he hadn’t been willing to let his brother take what he himself desired.

He knew no one would believe him, but there had been a time when he had been nearly pathologically selfless when it came to his baby brother. Their feud over Katherine would be the one thing that would end up coming between them for over a century.

Elena shifted again and the seatbelt released its hold on her shirt, allowing it to slide back up. It was a pity because he’d been enjoying the view.

Katherine had never worn proper ladies’ undergarments, and that knowledge had used to drive him nearly mad with lust. Knowing that she was bare under the layers of silk and lace, had made him desperate for her, and he would take her with them still mostly dressed. They had coupled that way many times: her skirts hitched up around her waist and his trousers undone as he rode her roughly while she laughed at his impatience. He could still hear her mocking giggles in his dreams and nightmares.

He remembered the period dress Elena had worn to the Founder’s Day Parade on the day Stefan swore to him that Elena was not Katherine. He’d gasped when he’d seen her in the gold, embroidered gown, her hair curled and her face radiant, and it was all he could do not to rush to her and spirit her away so he could rip down the front of the off-the-shoulder neckline, free her breasts, shove her dress up and thrust into her, fucking her until neither of them could remember their own names.

He must have moaned aloud because Elena’s eyes opened, and she looked sleepily at him. For a moment he thought Five Minutes Elena had made an appearance because she seemed happy to see him, but then her eyes narrowed, and she frowned.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

What was wrong? She was driving him out of his mind. That’s what was wrong. He needed a drink, a **_drink_** and a fuck, and he mentally tallied his odds of getting any one of those things with Miss Morality sitting next to him. Taking a glance at the fuel gauge, he decided to try for getting a burger, some pie and a waitress, not necessarily in that order.

“I’m hungry, and we need gas. I’m gonna find us a gas station and some food,” he replied.

“Okay.”

He took a chance on an exit that advertised gas, food and lodging, and was rewarded with a handful of choices for food ranging from bland Generica to local flavor. He chose a diner with a number of cars and semis in the parking lot and pulled into a spot. Elena got out, stretching to her full height and exposing her midriff. Damon bit the inside of his cheek and ushered her towards the restaurant with impatience.

“Hold your horses, caveman, I’m coming,” she muttered under her breath.

“What did you call me?” he demanded, cocking an eyebrow at her.

“Nothing,” she insisted, but he leered.

“Now, now, Elena, if you really want me to be a caveman, I could drag you in there by your hair.”

“Ass.”

“Always, baby.”

 


	4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

 

When they entered the diner, they were greeted by a tired-looking, middle-aged woman with graying blond hair and a set of laugh lines on her face that spoke of more hardship than joy, and she led them to a ratty booth with a scarred Formica table and duct tape slapped over rips in the vinyl benches. Elena wrinkled her nose in distaste, but sat down opposite him without making a scene.

“This place is a dump,” she complained.

He picked up the plastic covered menu and flipped to the burger section. “Maybe so, but the food is good.”

“How do you know?”

“All the tractor trailers in the parking lot. Truckers don’t care what a place looks like as long as the food meets their standards. And believe me, when you spend your life on the road, eating at cheap, greasy-spoons, you learn where the good ones are real fast.”

“Oh.”

A waitress in a blue uniform with a white apron came to take their order a few moments later. She looked to be in her late twenties with dark blond hair and a generous mouth. Like the woman who seated them, this woman looked older than her years, her beauty dulled by a dead-end job and a life of hardship. Her nametag read “Candy,” and Damon hit her with one of his biggest smiles. He wondered if she tasted like candy, too, and decided that he would find out very soon.

Elena ordered a turkey sandwich, and he got the deluxe burger and a slice of blackberry pie, then handed their menus to Candy with a smirk and a heated look. Her weary blue eyes lit up under his attention, and she smiled a genuine smile at him. Oh yeah, this one would be easy.

He watched her walk away to turn their orders in to the cook, then he saw her slip out the back as she fumbled for the pack of cigarettes tucked into her apron pocket. Seeing his chance, he rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” Elena demanded.

“I’ll be right back.”

“Damon…” she said, reaching out to grab his arm, and her voice held both warning and a threat. He rounded on her, his eyes flashing his rage.

“I’m not going to hurt her, and you do not get a say in this. Unless you want to walk to Chicago to rescue your precious Stefan, I suggest you let go of me.”

Her eyes widened a bit, and she was obviously remembering how he had ripped into Bill Forbes because she did the right thing and released him.

“Fine. Whatever,” she huffed, frowning in disapproval and looking away.

He gave her a glare of his own, then turned and slipped out the diner’s back entrance. Just as he thought, he found Candy leaning against the stuccoed wall of the building, hidden behind a dumpster and an air-conditioning unit, drawing on a cigarette as she tried to take the pressure off her tired feet.

“Well, hello there,” he crooned, turning on his charm. He didn’t need compulsion for this part. His stunning good looks did all the work for him right up to the point of the bite. Normally, he’d like to take a little more time and finesse his victim some, but today he was in a time crunch.

“What are you doing back here?” she replied. “I’m on my break.”

“I know. I thought I’d take a break with you,” he answered, sidling up to her with his shoulder against the rough surface. The paint was peeling in places, and the AC unit was dripping water into a puddle of green slime.

“Tell me, Candy, do you taste as good as your name?” he whispered into her ear, lowering his eyes and bringing his nose close to her neck.

He heard her breath hitch and smelled her arousal. He’d done this so many times that it no longer surprised him how quickly he could get them ready for him. These poor, tired, working stiffs needed almost no foreplay or encouragement to accept the brief respite he offered from their miserable lives.

“You’ll have to tell me,” she answered, dropping her half-smoked cigarette into the puddle.

“Mmmmm,” he sighed, working his hand up her thigh and under her skirt, his mouth already salivating with anticipation. She arched into his touch as he buried his nose into the curve of her throat and let his fangs down.

“All I got is ten minutes,” she warned.

That was fine. All he needed was four.

In a moment, he had her panties shoved aside and his jeans undone, and then he was in her, and she was in him, and it was the best three and a half minutes of her life. When it was over, he fed her a few drops of his blood to heal the wounds because she didn’t have a scarf handy, and he didn’t want to hear it from Elena if she saw the puncture marks.

He licked the last remnants of Candy’s blood from his teeth, sighing as he remembered how good blood tasted when taken directly from the source. Bill Forbes’ blood had been the first fresh blood he’d had in months, and it had been delicious, but Candy’s had been much, much better. Taking her chin gently in his hand, he made her look at him and caught her in his stare.

“You won’t remember us doing this or me feeding on you, but you will think I’m amazing, and you’ll flirt mercilessly with me,” he compelled as he smoothed her uniform back into place and patted her cheeks indulgently.

“God, you’re hot.”

“Perfect.”

Feeling much better now that his belly was full, and his balls were empty, Damon returned to his personal Purgatory. Elena gave him a scathing look as he sat down in the booth, but he was still tingling from his orgasm and his hot meal so all he did was grin at her.

“Enjoy yourself?” she snarked.

“You have no idea. She liked it, too. I’m awesome.”

“Ugh,” Elena scolded with a grimace and refused to meet his eyes.

He shrugged and refused to let her kill his buzz. He still had another six hours in the car with her, and he would savor his reprieve from the doom and gloom for a few minutes. Especially because it looked like Not Around Me! Elena had kidnapped Five Minutes Elena, bound and gagged her and tossed her in a dark closet, and Damon despaired of ever getting a glimpse of her on this trip unless he staged some sort of daring rescue.

He was contemplating his options in that regard when Candy brought them their food. She looked much happier and relaxed, and part of him felt proud to know that he’d helped lift some of her burdens from her shoulders, if only for a little while. He wanted to show Elena that not all feeding was murder and mayhem. Sometimes it could be beneficial for both parties – a symbiotic exchange instead of a parasitic one.

“Here ya go, handsome,” Candy said huskily as she put his burger down in front of him, bending down just enough to give him a nice look at her breasts. “Medium rare, just like you asked.”

“Why thank you, Candy, I really appreciate that,” he answered, winking at her.

She gave him another smile before turning to give Elena her sandwich.

“And here you are, Miss. You’ve got a nice looking man there.”

“You want him? I hear he’s available. Cheap,” she taunted, and the venom in her voice surprised even him.

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to say,” Candy chided.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be right now? More tables you could be **_servicing?_** ”

Damon was so shocked by her outburst that he almost believed that Katherine had taken her doppelganger’s place while he was out back, and he had to stop himself from grabbing her wrist and taking a bite just to make sure her blood was human. He settled for a reproachful hiss.

“Elena!”

She gave him a wide-eyed, stunned look, as if she was mortified by her own behavior, and she blushed crimson. Candy huffed away, muttering something about kids these days, and Damon was glad of it because he needed to focus all his attention on the changeling in the booth with him. He wanted to scold her, to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, but he quickly realized that a fight was exactly what she wanted. She was sitting hunched over, her arms rigid at her sides, spoiling for an argument so she could release her pent up frustrations. Well, there was a time for that sort of thing, but it wasn’t while they were on a long road trip, and it certainly wasn’t while they were in the middle of a diner in some podunk town in Ohio.

He waited, counting to ten, then fifty, then one hundred, until he finally heard her sigh and saw her relax. She gave him a brief look that was both apologetic and wary, and he gave her one he hoped was reassuring and non-judgmental. With a little nod, she reached up and took hold of her sandwich, taking a bite. He relaxed and began eating his own meal, choosing to consume the pie just in case she decided to go Hyde on him again before he’d finished. Life was short – well not really, but you got the idea. He’d eat dessert first.

After about ten minutes, it looked like the storm had passed, and he let his guard further down.

“I’ll take your pickle,” he offered, making a light-hearted reference to their time in Georgia. He hoped that reminding her of their trip would help ease the tension a bit.

In a flash, the anger was back, and she tossed the dill spear on his plate. “You can have it. It’s the only thing you’ll be getting out of me. Ever.”

Then she shoved the plate with half her sandwich still on it away from her and exited the booth in a huff, leaving him more than a little stunned as to where all the vitriol was coming from. He knew he had to get to the bottom of it because they were going into the Lion’s Den, and they had to work as a team if they were going to survive. He had no doubts that all of Elena’s anger stemmed from her own worry and guilt, and her confusion about her feelings for him, but right now he didn’t have the strength or the fortitude to wade into that particular cesspool; not with the Elena he was traveling with now. Five Minutes Elena could be reasoned with. Not Around Me! Elena didn’t want to hear anything he had to say.

He groaned and rubbed his temples to ward off the headache that was building behind his eyes. He felt like a manual transmission car being driven by a novice, and all his gears were being rasped and ground against each other. It was enough to make him wish he had his own alternate personality that he could call up to deal with the unpredictable teen’s mood swings.

But at least he was somewhat equipped to handle her, even if she was vastly different from the women he had been raised among. In that way, he had been very adaptable to the changing times, and the changing attitudes towards the “weaker” sex. He’d always prided himself in his ability to assimilate into each new era, a necessary and vital talent to have when you were immortal. If he had been less flexible like his father, or even Stefan to some extent, he would have been completely out of his league.

Today’s women would have baffled someone like his father, and even a relatively “progressive-minded” man like Jonathan Gilbert. He would not have known what to do with such a strong-willed, outspoken and irascible girl like Elena. Most likely, her attitudes would not have been well received. In fact, he knew all too well, that, if Elena had been born in 1864, her father would have certainly beaten the rebelliousness out of her – or at least tried to. Disobedience and insolence were simply not tolerated in those times – especially from a woman, and retribution was often swift and harsh.

He vividly remembered his father’s strap, lashing across his bare back as he was whipped for some transgression or failing. Giuseppe Salvatore had wasted no opportunity to mete out punishments he thought his eldest son had deserved, and he knew how to wait between blows so the pain of the next lash would not be dulled by the previous one. Damon had learned how to lock his jaw to keep from crying out. Often, he would bite the inside of his cheek until he swallowed his own blood in order to deny his father the satisfaction of hearing him howl.

As a young boy, he had spent quite a bit of time draped across his father’s knee, sobbing as Giuseppe’s firm hand fell across his exposed backside. Spankings were hard and frequent, until he supposedly outgrew them, but that didn’t keep his father from sometimes forcing him to lower his trousers and bend over when he wanted to further humiliate his son. For some whippings, he would make Damon count the strikes of the belt, thank him, and ask for another.

Stefan was fortunate. He had never been whipped. Damon had always been what could be considered fiercely protective of his brother, and he had refused to allow his father to beat his younger sibling. Once he had seen his father cuff Stefan on the side of the head, and he had become so incensed by it, that he’d vowed his brother would never feel the strike of their father’s belt. To that end, he’d taken responsibility for misdeeds his brother had done, and he had accepted their father’s punishment in Stefan’s stead.

On one afternoon in particular, it was discovered that several horses had gotten out of their pasture, including a mare that was in season. She had made her way over to the Fell Plantation, and had mated with their prize stallion. When the horses were discovered, there was much uproar, and their father had been furious. Damon had known that Stefan had been out riding that morning, and he had been negligent with the paddock latch in the past. It didn’t take him long to determine that the culprit was his brother, but he claimed that he was the guilty party.

Screaming about what an irresponsible, untrustworthy son he was, Giuseppe had dragged Damon to the woodshed, and Damon, never one to give in when bullied, had taunted his father to a nearly incoherent rage. His father had then stripped him to the waist and whipped him bloody. Afterwards, a servant, Samuel, had attended to his wounds in Damon’s room while Stefan had blubbered in the corner.

“You mustn’t defy him so, Master Damon,” Samuel had warned as he’d rubbed a healing salve onto Damon’s skin.

“I will defy him as I like. He is a ruffian and a tyrant,” he had answered, trying very hard not to whimper every time the man touched his ruined flesh.

“It’s my fault,” Stefan had said, sniffling and wallowing in guilt and remorse even then. “I was the one who left the gate unlocked and let the horses out. Now Mr. Fell will demand a stud fee if Star is with foal. I should tell Father that it was me.”

“You will do no such thing!” he had snapped. “If you do, you will be whipped, and all of the suffering I endured for you will have been for naught.”

“But you should not have to suffer on my account, Damon,” his brother had argued in a whiny voice Damon had hated.

“I bear it willingly, brother. I am nearly immune to pain. Father cannot hurt me any longer,” he had assured Stefan. “Keep silent, brother. It’s better this way.”

It was obvious that Stefan had not agreed with him, but he had obeyed, and Damon had been content with that. He would endure numerous more whippings in the years leading up to his enlistment in the army, all to spare Stefan the pain of being lashed, and he knew he’d do it all again if given the same choice. He’d do it for anyone he loved.

It occurred to him, sitting in the diner some 145 years later, staring at the empty bench opposite him that she had just abandoned in a fit of pique, that, if Elena had been his sister, his back would have been latticed with whip scars, and the wounds would never have had a chance to heal between beatings.

 


	5. Chapter Five

Chapter Five

 

Damon figured he’d give Elena some time to get her head back on straight before he lopped it off her shoulders in his own fit of rage, so he leisurely finished his burger, flirted more with Candy, had her box up what was left of Elena’s lunch, and paid the bill, leaving Candy a very generous tip. He found Elena sitting on the hood of his car when he finally sauntered out of the diner, and part of him was disappointed to see her there. It was the part of him that secretly hoped she’d conned some trucker into taking her to Chicago so he could hunt them both down and have his own bit of Ripper fun.

Another part of him was very glad that she hadn’t been stupid enough to go off with a stranger. Some of those truckers could secretly be dangerous psychotic killers, dumping bodies along remote sections of the interstate. He ought to know; he used to be one.

She hopped off the hood of the Camaro as he walked over to her, putting extra swagger in his hips just to antagonize her. It worked because she crossed her arms over her chest and gave him her deepest scowl. Yup, Not Around Me! Elena had not only bound and gagged Five Minutes Elena; she’d beaten her into a coma.

“About time,” she snapped, glaring daggers at him.

He smirked and mentally decided that, if she **_had_** been his sister, he **_would_** have let their father spank her because she was a spoiled child with a staggering sense of moral superiority and self-righteousness. He let himself imagine it, and he envisioned Elena draped across his father’s knee, bare ass upturned to Giuseppe’s hand, squirming and sobbing “I’m sorry” as the tears ran down her face.

Ah, the pleasure of fantasy keeping him grounded and centered, so he didn’t act on his own feelings of anger and betrayal and kill her, or spank her himself. He doubted **_that_** would go over well.

Spanking a disobedient woman was no longer considered an acceptable practice, unlike back in the Fifties when it was pretty much the norm. Nowadays it just wasn’t done unless it was relegated to BDSM or domestic discipline.

Which was why crap ass “Mommy Porn” books about it were selling like hotcakes and spurring movie deals. Who the fuck was Christian Grey anyway? He sounded like a seriously disturbed fucker if you asked him.

Leering, he shoved the doggie bag into Elena’s hands as he unlocked the car and opened the door for her like the gallant gentleman he was; never hinting that he’d been secretly enjoying a daydream of her getting her ass paddled red. He supposed it was better than picturing her face turning blue as he strangled the life out of her.

“What’s this?” she demanded, indicating the bag.

“I don’t believe in wasting food. Besides, you might get hungry before we get to Chicago, and that will make a nice snack.”

She held up the jelly donut covered in powdered sugar and wrapped in parchment paper.

“And this?”

“That is **_mine_** ,” he answered in a warning tone as he sauntered around the car and got into the driver’s seat.

She snorted, shook her head and got into the car, dropping the bag at her feet and staring out the window so she wouldn’t have to look at him. He shrugged and turned the ignition, loving the sound of the engine as it roared to life.

His first stop was a gas station for fuel, where he noted that Elena was pointedly ignoring him. Well, that was fine. He had a choice. He could allow her to continue to stew in her own arrogance – no doubt she was holding in one of her stunningly condescending little rants that she loved so much, or he could be a rat bastard and push every single one of her buttons that he knew how to find blindfolded and with one hand tied behind his back. One would lead to continued silence, probably for the next six or so hours until they got to Chicago. The other would lead to a rip-roaring, knockdown fight that would have her screaming at him in the closed confines of his car.

He opted for a third choice that was a bit of both because he’d always been good at playing both sides. Reaching behind him for Stefan’s journal, he handed Elena the yellowed diary.

“Your light reading for the afternoon, m’lady,” he prodded. “If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me.”

He gave her a smirk and a waggle of his eyebrows. She curled her lip in disgust and yanked the book out of his hand.

“Because it isn’t anything you haven’t done before,” she sneered.

“Actually… yes it is. I never ripped my victims apart. I never blacked out. I never played finger paint the living room with blood, and I never put my victims back together like broken dolls. That was Stefan’s shtick. Me, I learned that leaving a trail of dismembered bodies around tended to upset the locals,” he snapped back angrily.

Fuck it. If that was how she was going to be, he’d choose “rat bastard” and go after **_all_** her buttons with both barrels loaded.

“Don’t try to make yourself out to be a saint! You’ve killed innocents! You were horrible to Caroline, and you killed my brother!” she shouted.

“Back to that, are we?” he complained. God, would she never shut up about him breaking that kid’s neck? “He came back. Stefan killed our father, and he didn’t.”

“You killed Ric!”

“I killed Ric to prove a point, and I knew he would come back. It doesn’t count. You were both pissing me off, trying to tell me how to be. I’m not Stefan, Elena. I’m not going to be Stefan. Believe me, you don’t **_want_** me to be Stefan,” he warned.

“So you’re telling me you’ve never done anything like what Stefan says he did in this diary,” she countered, her voice accusing.

“No. I didn’t torture my prey, I didn’t take pleasure in causing them pain, and I didn’t drag out their deaths if I was going to kill them, but most of the time I **_didn’t_** kill them. I preferred to find, feed, fuck, and make them forget.”

“Like you did with **_Candy?_** ” she shot back.

Okay, the jealous bullshit was getting old. She didn’t want him, and he didn’t belong to her, and he wasn’t going to let her sully the one good thing he’d done today.

“Yes, exactly like Candy. I was the best thing that happened to her all day, and she doesn’t even remember it. All she knows is that now she feels better. She got to flirt with the hotness that is me, and I gave her a big tip,” he answered.

“After you used her, drank her blood, and made her forget!”

“Hey! Hey! It was mutual, honey. I don’t need to coerce a woman to drop her panties for me; they practically throw them at me. And just because she doesn’t remember the mind-blowing orgasm I gave her doesn’t mean her body doesn’t. You can bet that her toes are **_still_** tingling.”

“You’re a jackass, and don’t call me honey!”

“Would you rather I called you a hypocritical, judgy bitch?”

She gasped and gaped at him, her eyes flashing rage. “You bastard! Stop the car!”

“No.”

“Damon, you stop the car right now!”

“Make me. C’mon, Elena, I’d like to see you try,” he challenged.

“I swear to God, Damon, if you don’t stop this car, I’m jumping out of it while it’s still moving!”

He stepped on the gas and revved the Camaro up to eighty. “Go ahead, Elena! Have fun getting splattered all over the asphalt.”

“You sick ass!”

“No, Elena, I’m a vampire. You don’t play chicken with a vampire. We’re immortal. We always win.”

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded, her voice hoarse and her eyes brimming with unshed tears. She was so angry, she was almost purple.

“Why am I doing what? Not taking orders from you anymore, Elena? Because I’m done being your dog. You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Because you’ve got the market cornered on that!”

“Back to the compulsion crap, are we? I seem to remember a certain tearful sister asking me to compel her brother.”

“That was different. I did that to protect Jeremy, not make him forget he’d been made into a vamp snack,” she argued, sniffling.

“Would you rather I have compelled Candy to jump to her death like my brother compelled Andie?” he seethed.

“That wasn’t Stefan. Stefan wouldn’t do that. Klaus has to be controlling him somehow.”

He wanted to scream and rip out his own fingernails. Of course Stefan would never do that. Stefan would **_never_** compel an innocent woman to kill herself. Oh no, it had to be **_Klaus_** who made him do it.

“Bullshit! You’re reading the Adventures of Stefan the Ripper Douche. You know damn well he’d do that. It was right up his alley! He compelled her to jump, then he grabbed me and held me against a wall so I couldn’t save her,” he growled. “Her brains splattered all over the floor in front of me, and there was fuck all I could do about it!”

He glared at her, his vision red. “And why did he do that? Because I wouldn’t give up looking for him, because **_you_** wouldn’t give up looking for him. You had to save him. You had to get him back. I followed every lead, combed every paper and police blotter, tracking his Ripper ass up and down the east coast, trying to nail him down; all the while trying to keep you from finding out what a psycho murderer your boyfriend had become.

“And in the end, as usual, all my efforts were worthless because you and Blondie had to snoop in **_my_** bedroom, and dearest baby bro had to send me a message by killing the messenger. Andie’s dead because I wouldn’t take the hint and drop it.”

He seethed, baring his teeth and growling. “Why the fuck are we in this car now, driving to Chicago? Because my bitch of an ex told us **_Stefan_** is there, and off we go like a pair of Pavlov’s dogs.”

He slammed his hand against the steering wheel in frustration, making the car lurch to one side and nearly go off the road. The passenger side tires crossed the white line and dropped into the gravel shoulder, pulling the car further off the asphalt. He jerked the car to the left as Elena screamed and grabbed at the dashboard. He grabbed hold of the wheel with both hands and steadied the Camaro before it could start to fishtail, guiding it back into the proper lane. Silence ensued as they both panted and got their emotions under control.

“I’m sorry about Andie,” she finally said, her voice rough. “I just realized that I never told you that. I was so caught up in following the lead to Tennessee that I didn’t even think to mention it.”

He recalled that little oversight of hers, and the sting of her dismissal. He’d told her about Andie’s death the morning after her party, when she had found him taking down all of the newspaper clippings and post-it notes from the inside of his closet door. She’d brushed Andie’s death, and Stefan’s hand in it, into the little box marked Denial, and plowed ahead with her insistence that Stefan was in Tennessee.

And when he had refused to help her, she’d gone all Xena Warrior Princess on him, taking Alaric with her as her Joxer into a forest full of werewolves on a full moon. At least Ric was a more competent fighter than the bumbling sidekick, and he’d had the good sense to call Damon so he could come in and play Ares.

He still remembered how much fun it had been to shove Elena into the river. The memory of her soaking wet, gaping at him in shock made him smile a bit, and he calmed down.

“Yeah, well… thanks,” he said, acknowledging her apology even if it was a bit late.

“I know you… cared about her.”

He laughed dryly. “She was my fake, compelled girlfriend.” He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to tear up. “But she was a good woman, and she didn’t deserve what Stefan did to her.”

“No,” Elena softly agreed.

They were quiet for a few minutes as the emotions ebbed and flowed around them. He didn’t know which Elena was with him, and he thought maybe it was just Elena for once and not any of her alter egos. Finally, he sighed and looked over at her sitting in the bucket seat, her head bowed and her hair hiding her face.

“Look…” he began, trying to keep his voice steady and calm. “We still have six hours in the car before we get to Chicago. Let’s not fight, okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed, nodding a little.

“I really think you need to finish reading that journal. I don’t know what we are going to find when we get there, but my guess is it’s going to be a lot like what my brother describes in those pages. You have to be ready to face that and deal with it,” he told her as gently as he could.

She didn’t reply right away, and he could almost hear the gears of her mind whirring.

“Did Stefan really do all those things he writes about in the diary?” she asked.

He bit back the sarcastic answer that flew to his tongue because she sounded so young and broken.

“Yeah,” he confirmed, taking no pleasure in it. He’d never taken pleasure in Stefan’s Ripper madness.

She made a small sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob, and it cut him like a knife. He felt so bad for her. All of her illusions were being stripped away, and there was nothing he could do about it because he was the one responsible for her shattered dreams.

“Did I ever really know him?” she questioned in a whisper.

“You knew the man he wanted to be.”

 


	6. Chapter Six

Chapter Six

 

The rest of the trip passed without any more screaming matches or near death experiences. Elena took his request to heart and spent most of the time reading Stefan’s diary, but there were times when he could tell that she was having trouble processing what his brooding baby bro had penned on the pages, so he would take it upon himself to distract her.

Sometimes he would ask her a question that required an answer like asking if she could confirm that the lane next to them was clear and not harboring one of those ghastly SmartCars that looked like half a car smashed into a wall. It was like those dogs with the squashed faces that people loved so much. He always wanted to put the poor things out of their misery, because how could someone breed a dog that looked like it was repeatedly slammed into a window like that?

Sometimes he would regale her with funny stories about the places they were passing through, like the time he’d gone to a rock concert in Dayton where they had to stop the show because someone kept throwing candy on stage, and it was getting stuck to the band’s shoes. Elena giggled, smiling at him.

“I can so see you at a rock concert,” she said.

“Love ‘em,” he admitted. “Rock and Roll really changed the world. The Beatles, Motown, **_Disco_** … Okay, we could have lived without Disco.”

He made a face, and Elena laughed.

“Admit it. You had a white suit just like Travolta,” she teased.

“Oh hell no! I was not Tony Manero. I was Danny Zuko in the leather jacket…”

“With the slicked back hair…”

“Greased Lighting, Baby, **_and_** I got the girl in the hot pants.”

She laughed. “I can so see you with the pompadour and the muscle shirt.”

“You better believe it. The 60’s were so much better than the 70’s, but the 80’s were awful. GlamRock.” He shuddered. “I blame the Metal Hair Bands for that. They glamorized spandex pants and makeup. Do you know how uncomfortable Spandex pants are?”

“Poor baby,” she said, giving him a mock pout.

“It was awful. I was seeing this girl from Albany. She was hot, but she was into all the metal bands: Kiss, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Poison… Daddy was a shipping magnate so she was rolling in it. She’d drag me to every concert from Columbus to Boston. She’d dress me up in tiger-print pants with a leather vest, and wrap this ridiculous headband into my hair. I wore eyeliner. I was a train wreck. Thank god I burned the pictures.”

Elena was smiling now, not like Five Minutes Elena, but a far sight from Not Around Me! Elena.

“Oh, c’mon, you know you loved it,” she teased. “I bet you totally rocked the tight pants.”

“No, **_David Bowie_** totally rocked the tight pants in _‘Labyrinth.’_ Sarah was an idiot not to choose the Goblin King.”

“I’ve actually never seen that movie,” she replied.

“Seriously? I would have thought that would be an American teen’s classic. Right up there with _‘Legend’_ and a very young Tom Cruise.”

Elena wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Never liked Tom Cruise much.”

“How could you not like Tom Cruise? He’s the Mission Impossible guy, jumping out of exploding buildings and dueling on motorcycles,” he argued.

She shrugged. “Never liked motorcycles, though I’m surprised you don’t have one. I would’ve pegged you for a biker dude.”

He grinned evilly. “Who’s to say I don’t?”

“So you have a bike stashed somewhere just like Stefan had his Porsche hidden in the garage?”

His smile turned sly. “I’ve got Steve McQueen’s 1968 Triumph Bonneville.”

She snorted and shrugged. “Whatever that is. You’re forgetting I don’t speak car… or motorcycle for that matter.”

“Let’s just say it’s one sexy beast, like me, and it beats the hell out of those little crotch rockets you people think are so great these days.”

She snorted again. “Conceited much?”

“Have you met me?” he teased.

“Unfortunately. I’ve seen you naked too.”

Well, Hell, if she was going to play **_that_** game, she’d better be ready to play with the big boys. “And you didn’t faint. I was impressed. Most women swoon at the sight of my male perfection.”

“Ass,” she said, but she was smiling.

“Yes, and if you’d kept your eyes uncovered long enough, you would’ve seen that, too.”

“Ugh!” she groaned, rolling her eyes, and pointedly stuck her nose into Stefan’s diary. He just smirked and enjoyed the pleasant company for as long as it lasted.

They hit traffic outside of Indianapolis, but it wasn’t too bad. They crawled along at 25 mph for about thirty minutes before the jam cleared out, and they were back up to speed. They had to stop twice more for gas, but they didn’t stop to eat. Elena ate the rest of her sandwich, and he ate the jelly donut washed down with a bag of O Pos from the cooler behind her seat. He was planning on taking her to dinner once they were settled in Chicago so he didn’t want her to ruin her appetite by eating on the road again.

They pulled into Chicago around 7 p.m., and he immediately took her to Stefan’s old apartment. He wanted to see if Stefan had returned to his old stomping grounds or maybe left some clues in the abandoned flat he still owned. The hall of the old building was quiet and musty as he led her to the old door, but the original wainscoting still lined the walls, and he could still smell the scent of the old varnish.

“Stefan could live anywhere in Chicago, and he chose this?” she asked, obviously disgusted by the shabby, run-down appearance of the building. Little did she know the place was considered posh by 1920’s standards. Not on par with Gatsby opulence, but clean and comfortable.

“There used to be an all girls’ high school around the corner, but it was shut down for attendance issues. Weird,” he replied, putting emphasis on attendance issues.

“If you’re trying to scare me into giving up and going back, it’s not going to work,” she warned him, her voice condescending. She was being her usual defensive self, but he could see her barge waiting to sail off down the river of De Nial.

He shushed her, concentrating his senses on trying to determine if anyone was in the apartment, and, when he was sure it was empty, he reached out and broke off the knob, undoing the flimsy lock. With a smirk, he pushed open the door to reveal his baby bro’s own version of a time capsule, a perfect example of a 1920’s style bachelor pad.

“Here we are. Stefan’s second personality home,” he stated, allowing Elena into the flat as he closed the door behind them and cast his eyes about the old place.

It was dusty and smelled stale. No one had been here for a very long time. It took Elena two seconds longer to figure that out for herself.

“He obviously hasn’t been here,” she said, pointing out the obvious as she wiped the dust from a cocktail table.

“Tour’s not over yet,” he warned, moving to the built-in cupboard and feeling along the edge of the moulding. His fingers found the latch, and he pulled the whole cabinet out to reveal the hidden closet behind. He took a moment to enjoy her surprised look before he motioned her over with his head.

She came forward as he pulled the string to turn on the light, and she scowled at the shelves of liquor lining the secret compartment.

“Stefan hid his alcohol. What a monster,” she snarked, unimpressed.

He wasn’t impressed by her attitude, but he recognized it for the defense mechanism it was. She always beat on him when she was upset and trying to hide her fear. Sometimes he wondered if she did it because she knew he could take it. God knew she never was such a bitch to his brother even when he deserved it. In this case, even though she had spent several hours reading Stefan’s journal, she still couldn’t make herself believe that her perfect boyfriend could have been the same man… vampire, who had committed the crimes detailed in the diary. No, it was much easier for her to go after Damon than to admit that there was a whole side to St. Stefan that she’d never seen and definitely did not want to meet.

He wasn’t going to let her get away with running, mentally or physically, and he canted his head for her to peer deeper into the closet. “Look harder.”

She stepped around him to see the plaster wall inscribed with rows upon rows of names. He’d known they were there, of course. He knew his brother, and he knew Stefan had a wall of names in every place where he had lived for any length of time. It was almost a compulsion for him, a way to do penance by remembering each of his victims.

When Damon had broken into the flat back in 1922 to snoop around, it hadn’t taken him long to find his brother’s secret stash and his wall of names. Yes, Stefan was **_that_** predictable, and Damon wondered what Elena would do if she ever found the wall of names scrawled on the back of the bookcase in Stefan’s room at the boarding house.

 “It’s a list of names,” she said.

“Mm hmm,” he confirmed.

Her face grew more and more concerned as she read the words, and he could hear her heartbeat quickening. “Are these all of his victims?”

“Still handling it?” he taunted, stepping away from her as she started to pant.

“What were you doing in the 1920’s? Paving the way for women’s liberation?” she demanded, deflecting her turmoil onto him.

He shrugged and got cocky like he always did when someone was hell bent on making him her whipping boy. “I was around. Chicago’s a big city.”

He turned and gave her a look, smirking. “Stefan was a cocky, Ripper douche, but I could avoid him and still indulge in a few Daisy Buchannans of my own.”

“Pffft,” she replied, curling her lip and crossing her arms over her chest.

Not Around Me! Elena was back in force and had been pretty much from the moment he’d parked the car. He wasn’t surprised, but he did allow himself a few seconds of disappointment. Not Around Me! Elena always put up such a fight when he wanted her to do something, and she’d refuse him just on principle, even if she knew he was right. Not Around Me! Elena was a bitch as big as her pride, and she would probably get them both killed, or at least him when he tried to protect her.

“Okay, tour’s over,” he announced, heading for the door. “Let’s go.”

“Wait. Where are we going?” she blurted, obviously surprised.

“I need to go to Gloria’s, and I’m not leaving you here. I made us a reservation at a hotel near the Magnificent Mile while you were taking a nap. We’ll head there, then I’ll head out to see what I can sniff out at Gloria’s.”

“I’ll come with you to see her,” she insisted.

He shut her down immediately. “Not a chance. If Katherine is right, and my baby bro and Klaus are hanging around Gloria, you need to stay as far away as possible until I can get the lay of the land. Then we can come up with a plan that has a chance of not getting us both killed. C’mon.”

He didn’t wait to see if she was following as he left the apartment and went down to his car. She joined him a moment later, her face sullen as she got into the passenger seat. He flashed her a grin and moved the Camaro into traffic, navigating the streets until he brought them to the hotel. He smiled when he saw it, remembering it when it was new. It was still impressive now, but back then… back than anyone who was **_anyone_** stayed there.

“The **_Drake_** , Damon? Seriously?” Elena blurted, her eyes wide as saucers as he pulled up to the famous hotel.

He shrugged and gave her one of his “Who me?” looks. He could tell her that he had fond memories of this place, and that the 1920’s were one of the few times when he could say he was happy. The Roaring 20’s roared. They had everything he craved and loved, and he had immersed himself in the drama, glamour and joie-de-vivre of the era. The women, the music, the devil-may-care attitude of the Prohibition Era where good people brazenly flipped the Feds a middle finger; it was all right up his alley.

Coming off of his time with Sage and his embrace of his vampire nature (he really was as boring as his brother for the first fifty years of his vampiric existence), stuck on Katherine and moving his way through immortal life like a shade at the edge of the world, he was ready to live life to the fullest. Once Sage had shown him the pleasures that were to be had, he’d thrown himself into them with both feet and never looked back, and if part of his almost manic verve had something to do with guilt over urging his brother off the human-blood cliff, he never admitted it. If he winced when he saw the headlines of the Ripper of Monterey that was just a coincidence. And if he followed Stefan from California to Chicago, that was all about him making his douche brother miserable and nothing to do with him secretly trying to keep an eye on him.

“Checking in, Sir?” the valet asked as Damon put the top down.

“Yes,” he confirmed, smiling and snagging the man with his eyes. “You will handle my car as if it is the priceless Classic it is. You will park it away from the other cars, and you will not get a scratch on it.”

“I’ll make sure your car is completely safe, Sir,” the valet assured, his expression blank.

“Of course you will.”

He and Elena got out of the car, and he could see her tugging self-consciously at her jean skirt, but he played ignorant as he gathered his black bag and the cooler with his blood from behind the passenger seat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Elena pick up her gym bag and sling it over her shoulder, even as she nervously hooked an errant lock of hair behind her ear. The innocent action made his heart clench, and he had to turn away. He chose instead to hand the keys to the valet.

“You won’t look in the trunk. The trunk does not exist. There is nothing of value or interest in the trunk,” he stated, compelling the man again. There were certain items in the trunk that, while not illegal to have, would certainly raise a few eyebrows. Let’s face it, not too many people drove around with a crossbow and bag full of knives and sharp, pointed sticks under the tire well.

“The trunk does not exist.”

“Good man.”

He entered the hotel without a backwards glance, knowing Elena was right behind him, dogging his steps as he breezed through the elaborately decorated lobby and strode directly to the reservation desk. Her heartbeat was elevated, and her scent betrayed her nervousness, which surprised him. In Mystic Falls, she was all but royalty, one of the Founding Family members and a child of privilege. Even after losing their parents and both their guardians, she and Jeremy were still able to live in the house they grew up in, and maintain their lifestyle due to the money they had inherited from the generations of Gilberts that had come before. Trusts and executors had been appointed, although now that Elena was 18 she could determine her own fate, to take care of the estate and investments so the children never had to worry about a mortgage payment or a missed bill.

One of the things that struck him the most was how little Elena or Jeremy knew about the daily tasks of being a functional adult. Neither had any idea how to handle money, pay a regular bill or keep a budget. Over the summer, he’d helped Jeremy open a checking account and taught him how to keep a checkbook, how to balance it and how to reconcile the transactions. It was made much easier with the advent of Quicken and online account access, but the basics were the same. Jeremy was grateful for the lessons, and Damon could already see that he would be good with his money.

He would have taught Elena, too, if she’d let him, but since he was an irrational, unpredictable ass, she’d practically laughed in his face when he suggested it, so he’d pawned that task off on Ric, who did it under duress. He would have taught her a lot of things about how to survive on her own: how to properly clean the house and do laundry (Jenna was hopeless as a Miss Heloise.), how to cook something other than crappy chili, how to tell when produce was fresh and at its most flavorful, and how to tell if it was spoiled. He would have given her lessons on how to do car maintenance and how to change a tire, rather than relying on roadside assistance. In Mystic Falls, sitting by the roadside waiting for AAA to show up could lead to a very bad night indeed.

“Checking in,” he told the front desk clerk who took one look at his plain black Henley and jeans, and at the suddenly shy waif behind him, and scowled.

“Your name, Sir?”

“Skinner. David Skinner,” he answered, fishing out the credit card with that alias on it. The snooty attitude dropped as soon as she saw the Palladium Card insignia.

“Yes, Sir, of course, Sir. I’ll pull up your reservation immediately.”

“David Skinner?” he heard Elena whisper low enough for him to hear but not the clerk. He waved a hand to motion her to wait and she wisely kept quiet.

“Ah, here it is, sir. One deluxe family room with a lake view. Do you have your I.D.?”

He caught her eye and smirked. “You don’t need my I.D.”

“Oh, I see that this account doesn’t require I.D. Let me print your room key.”

A moment later the woman handed over a paper for him to sign, which he did with a flourish, and then she handed over the key card with a smile.

“I hope you enjoy your stay here with us, Mr. Skinner,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure we will. Thank you.”

He looked at Elena, motioning her over to the elevators. She was glaring at him disapprovingly until they got into the elevator where she rounded on him, all teen superiority and indignation.

“David Skinner? Was he one of your victims? Did you steal his credit card?”

The rush of sudden rage he felt threatened to overwhelm him, and he almost stopped the elevator between floors so he could have it out with her. He had expected her to take him to task for compelling the valet and the front desk clerk, but this… this took judgmental bitch to a whole new level. Only the threat of the alarm that would sound if he hit the stop button kept him from doing it, but Elena had the good sense to gasp and press herself against the paneled wall anyway.

“No. David Skinner was my friend,” he seethed, pinning her against the side of the elevator. “He got his head blown off in the battle at Swift Creek. Stefan didn’t know him, and it isn’t a name that anyone can associate with me. I’m not stupid enough to drag us both to Chicago where my Ripper Bro and the original were-vamp asshole might be, and then book a hotel under an alias either of them would recognize.”

He saw her begin to tremble so he backed off. They were almost to their floor anyway, but he was still roaring with fury. Every time, **_every time_** he thought he might have a chance with this girl, or at least might be able to be her friend, she did something like this, and he just wanted to rip out her heart the way she was doing to his.

“And I’ll have you know that the card is **_mine_**. I’m very good with money, and I have a lot of it, which is something you would know if you ever bothered to fucking pay attention. But thanks for reminding me about how you really feel about me. I need it every now and then because there are times when I actually believe you **_don’t_** think I’m a homicidal psychopath with no redeeming qualities.”

Rant over, the door opened onto a white and cream paneled hallway with blue and gold patterned carpet.

“I’m sor…” she began, but he rounded on her.

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it.”

She snapped her jaw shut and had the decency to look chagrined as she followed him down the corridor to their room. He slipped the key card into the lock slot and pushed open the door to reveal an elegantly appointed deluxe room with two queen beds and two bathrooms.

Barely glancing at the stunning view of Lake Michigan, he threw his bag on one of the white and beige draped beds and stashed his blood in the mini-fridge. Elena came in and gave him a wide berth, going to look out the wide window as he stomped around the room.

“I’m going to Gloria’s,” he stated, his voice still angry. “I will be back as soon as I can. This room has two bathrooms. Feel free to use one to take a shower. If you get hungry, order room service and bill it to my card.”

He stalked over to her, looming over her even though he wasn’t that much taller.

“Do not leave this room. Do not call anyone. Do not text anyone. Do not email anyone. Do not tell anyone where we are.”

He didn’t give her a chance to respond, but he could see her getting that stubborn set to her jaw.

“If you’re thinking of doing the whole Girl Power, I-can-do-what-I-want thing? **_Don’t._** Gloria is a powerful witch, and I don’t know if Klaus has gotten to her or what she knows. There are multiple variables at work here, and I need to know you aren’t one of them.”

He let his words sink in and saw her come out of her teen snit long enough to understand what he was trying to say. She nodded nervously in agreement, and he nodded once to her, his teeth clenched.

“Good. I’ll be back.”

He didn’t wait for her to answer as he walked out of the hotel room, letting the door slam behind him.

 


	7. Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

 

He was still furious when he got to the elevators, and he knew he needed to calm down before he went to see Gloria. Feeding always helped ground him so he nabbed a uniformed housekeeping employee – in his day, they called them maids, but they didn’t do that anymore in the world of political correctness, and compelled her to be quiet as he dragged her to a supply closet. Once inside the close quarters, he wasted no time in biting her neck, but he didn’t fuck her. He was too angry for sex. With how he was feeling right now, he would brutalize anyone he got close to in that way, and, after his loss of control with Jessica the night Rose died, he’d been doing his best not to have an instant replay every time he got upset.

He didn’t know her name, and he didn’t care. She was serving her purpose by being his personal blood donor, and he was doing his best to stay in control so he wouldn’t kill her. He pulled away when he was done, checking her over to make sure he hadn’t taken too much, then he healed her with a sip of his blood from a cut he made on his wrist. She was back to her cleaning by the time he got in the elevator, oblivious to what had just happened to her, and he was feeling decidedly less homicidal. He checked his appearance in the polished mirror at the back of the elevator, and he fixed his collar a bit as he contemplated his next move.

It was early in the evening, and he was hoping that Klaus and his brother would keep late hours. If he was lucky, he would catch Gloria before they arrived, but during happy hour so the bar would be open and full of patrons having a drink after work. The last time he and Stefan had been in Chicago, Stefan had been running with a vampire named Nick and his sister, Rebecca, and the three of them had made an unholy trio that he’d kept well clear of. He’d never actually met Stefan’s bosom buddies, but he’d heard plenty about their bloody escapades from Gloria.

Gloria wasn’t of the Bennett line, but he’d always made a point to know which witches were around, and he’d pegged her for a good one right away. She’d pegged him for a vampire right away, too, but back then it was well known in the witch world that Damon Salvatore had saved and protected the Bennett line. Emily Bennett’s children were still alive, albeit in their 80’s, but you would never know it from how they had preserved themselves with magic, and they’d made no bones about who had made sure they were safe and cared for after Emily was killed. It was through them that he had learned how witches could slow the aging process and live well into their 100’s.

His reputation for protecting, and practically raising, Emily’s children had scored him points within the witch community, and he’d always gotten on well with them. They walked in two worlds much the same as he, and he’d found that they were more willing to accept his true nature. He and Gloria had hit it off pretty well the first time he’d seen her, and she’d been more than willing to fill him in on the antics of his brother and his new best friends.

Stefan was no longer at the height of his Ripper glory after leaving Monterey, and Damon had followed him to Chicago, arriving a few months after his brother if his timing was correct. He hadn’t followed right away because he’d been busy doing damage control, and making sure any enemies Stefan had made during his time on the west coast were neutralized. In Chicago, the blackout rage that had consumed Stefan in California had dulled to a slow burn, but a kind of cold cruelty had taken its place. Instead of ripping his victims apart in an uncontrolled frenzy, Stefan began toying with his prey, delighting in causing physical and emotional pain. It was like ripping the wings off a butterfly just to see it writhe around in agony and confusion.

Stefan hadn’t been like that as a human, but Damon had seen the potential in him. Damon had more of their mother in him, while Stefan had taken after their father. Giuseppe was a hard, cruel man whom Damon could never please, and he’d often wondered if that disappointment had been passed on to Stefan. God knew, no matter what he did, Stefan always had to do it better or faster or do something that would paint his brother in an unflattering light. Hell, he’d been trying to turn Elena against him pretty much before they’d even met. Part of him suspected that the Ripper had lived in Stefan all along, and it had just taken becoming a vampire to let it out.

When Damon had followed Stefan to Chicago, he wasn’t certain what he would find, but he had been hoping to at least be able to reconnect with his brother on some level. Unfortunately, by the time he’d caught up to Stefan, he’d already taken up with Nick and his sister, and the three of them were busy painting the town red – literally. It was easy in those days to get away with carnage, since it was the height of the gangster era and people were gunned down all of the time. But Damon could spot one of his brother’s kills right away, no matter how much Stefan would try to cover his tracks, and he was still repulsed by them.

He had tried once, early on, to talk to his brother one night when he’d come upon Stefan alone. The meeting had not gone well, and Stefan had retaliated by going after Damon’s latest favorite, a sweet chorus girl named Estelle. Much to Damon’s horror, Stefan conspired to “steal” Estelle from him, compelling her away from Damon’s protection and killing her. Little did Elena know that killing his brother’s girlfriends was a hobby of Ripper Stefan’s that his sibling practiced with glee. As of now, Damon counted four such girlfriends who had met their end at Stefan’s hands just because his brother had wanted to see Damon suffer.

In all the conversations he was sure Stefan had had with Elena about his “evil” brother, Damon, he wondered how many told the truth of their history, or the fact that Damon had damn good reasons for hating his brother and wanting to cause him pain. Just because decades later reformed St. Stefan had graduated from Lexi’s School of Repressed, Bunny-Munching Do Gooders didn’t mean that everything he had done to hurt Damon had been washed away. If anything, Stefan’s change of heart made things worse because he would get all wounded and beg Damon’s forgiveness when all Damon wanted to do was rip out Stefan’s eyeballs and feed them to him.

Stefan didn’t get to be sorry. He didn’t get to ask forgiveness. He had ruined Damon’s life, betrayed Katherine, forced him to become a vampire, killed their father, and spent the next 145 years being either a martyr or a Ripper douche. It wasn’t his place to come to Damon asking for absolution for his sins. Damon had none to give because Stefan had already taken everything he’d had.

To that end, Damon had avoided his brother during their time in Chicago, especially after Stefan had taken up with Nick and killed Estelle. Things got worse once Rebecca joined them, and Damon had been so disgusted by their sadistic games that he’d thrown up his hands and wiped them of all responsibility for his brother. Stefan had made his choices, and Damon knew he’d have to live with them.

Which brought him to where he was now, standing outside a good-sized bar with a good-sized crowd milling about inside. He’d walked to the bar rather than driving. He knew if things went south, he had a better chance of eluding a pursuer on foot rather than trying to navigate Chicago traffic. The bar wasn’t all that far away from the hotel, and the night was pleasant enough. He looked at the entrance, and the neon sign that read “Gloria’s” and knew he’d made it to the right place. The paint and signs were new, but it still smelled the same, and if he concentrated hard enough he could catch the scent of magic surrounding the place. Stefan had never learned the trick of sniffing out Power, but that was because his brother hadn’t spent nearly as much time among witches as Damon had, and he’d had no need to learn how to “nose” them out. Even if he didn’t know Gloria owned the bar, he would have known a powerful witch resided there regardless. Rolling his shoulders back and preparing for anything, he stepped through the door and looked around.

Gloria was behind the bar, and he approached her slowly, giving her every opportunity to notice him. She was wiping up an errant wet spot on the wood when she looked up and caught his eye. There was always a moment of uncertainly when meeting someone who knew his secrets, even if it was someone whom he had once considered trustworthy. He and Gloria hadn’t seen each other since he’d left Chicago in 1922, but he had no doubts from the look on her face that she recognized him.

She gave him a surprised look and a small smile as she tossed the rag down on the bar.

“Well look what the wind blew in. Last I heard, you hated this place,” she greeted, her smile widening, and it put him somewhat at ease.

“Gloria. Damn, if I knew you were going to age like this, I would’ve stuck around,” he complemented, turning on his charm.

“I always did like you better,” she admitted, a fondness in her voice before it turned cautionary. “But I see your brother is still running in the wrong crowd.”

“You’ve seen him?” he asked, surprised that she would divulge that information so quickly. Witches usually liked to hold their cards close to their chests.

He watched her with concern, tumbling all the different outcomes and reasons over in his head as Gloria retrieved the top shelf bourbon. He almost smiled when he realized that she’d remembered his favorite booze.

“With Klaus. Bad combo,” she said, pouring him the drink.

“You know where they went?” he asked.

She raised her gaze, and their eyes locked. In that moment he knew that she knew more than she was letting on, and every cell in his body went on high alert. He knew that look on a witch’s face, and it never led to anything good. He hated that look with a passion.

She held his eyes for several heartbeats as they both tried to read the other and figure out what to do next. Damon didn’t feel a threat coming off her, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Warily, he eyed the bourbon, wondering if she’d spiked or spelled it.

“It’s safe,” she told him, obviously noticing his concern.

He flicked her a look that told her he was unconvinced. She frowned and put a hand on her hip before calling to an assistant.

“Tommy, watch the bar a minute. I gotta go to the back.”

After receiving an acknowledgement from the tall, handsome man who was also behind the bar, Gloria stepped out, Damon watching her every move, and moved past him towards the rear of the club. He followed reluctantly, grabbing the bourbon and knocking it back in one gulp, as she led him to a small office. She closed the door behind them, and they faced off.

“Not that I don’t appreciate being brought back into your inner sanctum, but I don’t think making me pay for the bourbon in sexual favors was what you had in mind,” he said cockily, doing the eye thing Elena complained so much about.

It broke the tension, and Gloria laughed before she turned serious again.

“You’ve followed your brother. Just like last time. I was kinda hoping you’d show, but now I don’t know if you being here makes things better or worse.”

He furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”

“The last time you trailed your brother’s kills, he was mostly rogue, and **_then_** he met Klaus. Now it’s different. Now Klaus has a hold on him that he didn’t have before.”

“Before? What do you mean **_before_**? Stefan knew Klaus?” he demanded, his mind whirring with the repercussions. Stefan couldn’t possibly have known Klaus…

“Hmm hmmm, in the 20’s, and he’s the same bad news now for Stefan as he was then,” the witch confirmed.

“Stefan wasn’t with Klaus in the 20’s. He was with some pompous ass of a vamp named Nick and his psycho sister,” Damon argued, scowling.

“Exactly. Nic ** _klaus_** and his sister, Rebekah.”

The shock hit him like a punch in the gut and he physically recoiled. “What? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you telling me the same douche vampires Stefan ran with in the 20’s, slaughtering their way through the North Side, were **_Klaus_** and his **_sister?_** ” he gasped, not trying to hide his horror.

Gloria nodded and gave him a sympathetic look. “The very same. And he’s back with them now Damon, and he’s in deep.”

The air charged around them, and he fixed Gloria with a glare. If he could compel her, he would, but he knew better. He had to trust that she’d brought him back here because she was on his side.

“What do you know?” he demanded, all joking and flirting aside.

“I know Klaus broke the curse and now he’s trying to make more hybrids like himself,” she answered.

“Yeah, saw the results of that in Tennessee. It’s not going too well,” he stated, making sure she could tell from his tone that he wasn’t at all distressed that Klaus’s attempts were failing.

“I know. Word gets around fast in my world, and I knew it would just be a matter of time before he showed on my doorstep. I was his favorite witch for decades. I was looking into his problem well before he got here.”

“And?” he prompted. “C’mon, Gloria, don’t be a tease.”

Her face turned deadly serious and he knew, he just **_knew_** , that the next words out of her mouth would change everything.

“I know about the girl, Damon. I know the doppelganger is alive.”

He went cold, a denial on his lips, all of his protective instincts screaming for him to run, run back to Elena, because if Gloria knew then Klaus knew, and they were all as good as dead.

“I didn’t tell him,” she assured him, obviously reading his barely contained panic.

“How did you know? Did Stefan tell you?” he asked, proud of himself that he’d managed to keep the desperation out of his voice.

“No. You know him. He’s a hard nut to crack. I had to get it out of him with a little bloodletting spell I know,” Gloria responded as if bleeding a vampire was something she did every day. For all he knew maybe it was.

“But you’re both playing a dangerous game, Damon. Klaus can’t know she survived the ritual. Her blood is the key to everything.”

“What are you talking about?” he blurted, still caught on the fact that she’d blood-let his brother to get him to talk.

“The spell to break the curse was a paradox. In order to break the curse, Klaus had to kill the doppelganger, but in order to make more werewolf hybrids like himself, he needed her blood. It was a built-in failsafe should he ever succeed in capturing the doppelganger and breaking the curse.”

Her words were a bomb that went off in his head, and for a moment he was deaf and blind from the detonation.

“No…”

His vision cleared, and he could hear again, and he saw Gloria looking at him with pity.

“What you did… loving that girl like you do. Saving her just prolonged the inevitable,” she told him with sympathetic, but brutal honesty. He appreciated it. He really did.

“I have to go…” he breathed.

Gloria’s face turned worried. “Don’t you tell me you brought her with you.” His stricken look answered her, and she cursed. “Dammit. Damon, you have to get her out of here. You have to keep her as far away from Klaus as possible.”

“Don’t you think I know that!” he yelled, letting his pain ooze out of his pores. “Don’t you think that’s what I’ve been trying to do? She won’t let me! She loves him! She wants to **_save_** him, and she’ll do it with or without my help.”

“He’s beyond saving at this point, Damon. Your brother is gone.”

He couldn’t believe that, not after Stefan had saved him on the mountain, and he seized on that with both hands. “Did he fight you? When you did your spell, did he fight you?”

Gloria put her hands on her hips. “Yes, he fought, but he’s no match for me. He never learned how to resist the juju. You, on the other hand, you learned how to twist it even if you couldn’t break it. Emily’s kids taught you well.”

“But he **_did_** fight,” he pressed.

“He did, as much as he could, but he’s not a fighter, Damon. He never was. You were the fighter. Right now, he’s nowhere near strong enough to beat Klaus, and to be honest, he doesn’t want to. He thinks he’s martyring himself for the girl…”

“Elena,” he corrected. “Her name is Elena.”

Gloria gave him an irritated look, but complied. “For **_Elena_**. As long as he thinks giving in to Klaus is keeping her and you safe, he won’t resist.”

“How much did you tell him? Did you tell him that her blood was the key to making hybrids?” he asked, trying to make a game set out of the tattered chessboard in front of him.

“He knows what I know.”

He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “Then it’s just a matter of time before Klaus gets it out of him.”

Gloria nodded. “You have to get her out of here. Once he knows, Klaus will stop at nothing until he gets her, and he won’t care who he has to kill in the process.”

He knew. He knew all too well the lengths Klaus was willing to go to get what he wanted, and he knew that no one, not him, not Stefan, not Ric or Jeremy or any of the Mystic Falls Scooby Gang were safe. But at the same time, he also knew that Elena would never leave Stefan with Klaus until she at least had tried to see him.

Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous game. One wrong move and all of them were dead.

“When do you think they’ll be back?” he asked.

“Not tonight. Stefan will need time to recover from what I did to him. The juju messes with you bad if you don’t know how to shake it off. But my guess is they’ll be here tomorrow. Klaus will want answers. I half expected him in without Stefan today, but since I sent them to wake up Rebekah, I am sure she is keeping them busy.”

“Wait, you sent them to wake up **_Rebekah_**?” he gasped.

Gloria shrugged. “I needed her necklace. Turns out Stefan gave it to the… to Elena.”

The chessboard shattered in his mind. If the sister was now part of the game, all bets were off because she was as unpredictable as his brother. No. No, he and Elena needed to cut their losses and run.

“I’ll stall him for as long as I can, Damon, but eventually he’s gonna know I’m bluffing,” Gloria told him with a little shake of her head.

He looked at her and met her gaze, powerful being to powerful being.

“He’ll kill you,” he warned.

The witch rolled her eyes. “He can try, but I’m no novice witch any more, hon. He’ll have a fight on his hands.”

“Thank you,” he breathed, putting everything he had into the two words.

“Don’t thank me. You and your bother sealed your fates saving that girl. Now you have to live with it.”

Yes. Yes, they did. If they could, that was. If they could live.

And to live, they needed a plan. They needed a plan to defeat Klaus, a vampire who had proven undefeatable even with Elijah (the betraying bastard) vowing to help. Well, Elijah had dicked them over and disappeared, and there was no way he was trusting **_that_** Original ever again. No, they were on their own in this, and sailing without a compass.

He nodded to Gloria and slipped out the door, going out the rear entrance of the bar, which emptied onto a narrow alley. His mind was chaos, trying to wrangle all the different players into something that remotely resembled a fair chance at winning, but there was nothing. Nothing.

He felt bereft, the same way he’d felt when he’d opened the tomb only to find Katherine not there. He wandered down the alley, dazed and numb. He was going to lose her. No matter what he did, Elena would be taken from him, and what tiny place he’d carved in her life would be ripped out. Klaus would never accept him as another minion like Stefan, even though he was better at being bad… but maybe not. He was reckless, impulsive and homicidal. Stefan was all of those things and depraved as well. Stefan would do things that would revolt even Damon, and that was saying something.

He tried to see it, to part the veil of possibilities, and see what he could do, but nothing seemed to make it all work out. No matter what he did, he couldn’t figure out how to keep all of them alive.

 


	8. Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

 

He wandered for hours, filled with the irrational fear that Klaus knew he was there and was lurking behind every dark corner. Given their past dealings with the Original, it wouldn’t have been out of character for Klaus to have had someone watching Gloria’s bar to see if he showed up looking for his brother. If that was the case, then someone could have followed him, and he was afraid that he would lead an enemy right back to Elena.

Secretly, he prayed that Elena had listened to him and had stayed put in their room at The Drake. If she’d been stubborn, and had gone off on her own, he would waste precious time looking for her that could be used getting the hell out of Dodge or formulating a plan.

He laughed without mirth. Plan? What plan? What plan could possibly **_not_** end with Elena getting taken by Klaus and the rest of them dying? Klaus had out-maneuvered them every step of the way up to and including the night of the full moon. There was no reason to believe that he wouldn’t do it again. No matter how he pictured it, it always ended the same – with Elena either dead or taken and the body count piling up. Things were spiraling all around him, and he hadn’t felt this out of control since the night he’d forced his blood down Elena’s throat because he was terrified of losing her.

After having to clean up the mess of his colossal fuck-up, he swore to himself that he would at least try to keep a level head and not go off half-cocked and stupid, but this situation was sorely trying that resolve. As far as he could tell, he had four options.

Option One: Kill Elena. This would solve the problem of Klaus being able to make hybrids. No doppelganger blood equaled no hybrids. It also equaled no him or Stefan because he knew both he and his brother would kill themselves. If he didn’t suicide over killing her, his brother or Klaus would certainly do it for him, and then Stefan would off himself out of pure guilt.

So, Option One was out.

Option Two: Make Elena a vampire. Also solved the pesky doppelganger blood problem, but at least Elena would be an alive undead person. Aside from earning her eternal hatred, which he could live with he decided, considering the alternative, it would also guarantee that she would have to run from Klaus for eternity to avoid his wrath. The likelihood of him, Stefan, Elena and everyone Elena loved dying by Klaus’ pissed off hand was pretty high. Plus, Elena really, really, **_really_** didn’t want to be a vampire, and, in fact, would rather die than become one of the undead. On the night of the full moon, after everything he went through to try to stop the ritual and correct his mistake, he’d made a promise to himself that, if Elena ever became a vampire, it wouldn’t be him who was responsible for turning her.

Scratch Option Two.

Option Three: Go home and prepare for battle. It stood to reason that eventually Klaus would find out what was going on, and probably sooner rather than later. They had maybe two weeks – tops – before Klaus came haring back to Mystic Falls looking for Elena, at which point, the whole town would become a blood bath. Klaus would start with people Elena knew and work his way up. Elena would either give herself over to prevent further carnage or they’d all die trying to protect her. Odds of him, Ric, Blondie, Witchy and Junior Gilbert making it out alive? Pretty slim. Stefan? Depended on which team he decided to pitch for.

Reject Option Three because the body count was ridiculously high, even though if he knew Elena, Option Three was the one she’d go for; y’know, the one that had them holed up like rats in a trap trying to fend off the mountain lion roaming outside. Because letting your enemy pin you against a wall was **_always_** the best defense.

Option Four. Take Elena and run. This was **_his_** favored option. It gave him and Elena a head start and a fair chance at making it. It also gave the others a fair shot of not ending up dead if they could convince Klaus that they had no idea where Elena was, although he might kill them just out of spite. Still, if they ran too… It could work.

He **_wanted_** to take her and run, to just disappear into the wide world with her never to be seen again. Katherine had run from Klaus for 500 years. How hard would it be to elude him for 70 or 80 until Elena died a natural, human death? He was sure he could do it. He wasn’t the reckless loose cannon he played in Mystic Falls. Anyone who really looked at the decisions he’d made would have seen him for the strategist he was; doing his best to make Poo Pets out of the piles of shit he’d been given to work with.

Everyone thought Stefan was the smart brother, and he was the irrational idiot charging off full steam ahead. But if anyone ever bothered to examine his decisions, he would see that Damon was anything but irrational. Everything he did was geared towards a result he wanted, even if it meant being a blunt, heartless bastard to get it.

But Elena would never do it. She would never run. She wouldn’t leave her brother or her friends, and she wouldn’t give up on Stefan. Even after what Stefan had done to Andie, even after seeing the articles about his brutal kills, even after reading the diary, Elena still thought she could save Stefan.

_‘Well, you **told** her he could be saved. If you’d have just kept your damn mouth shut and **lied** to her about finding him on the mountain…’ _ No. He couldn’t lie to her. He could hide the truth from her, and he probably could/should have, but he couldn’t lie to her. The one thing their relationship had over hers with Stefan was honesty. It wasn’t always pretty, it wasn’t always nice, but it was always true.

And Damon knew the truth. Elena wouldn’t run. No matter how much he begged, pleaded, or tried to rationalize the option with her, Elena would never run.

He could rip off her necklace and compel her to run with him. He was pretty sure she wasn’t drinking or eating vervain, so one quick snap of the chain ought to make her his for the taking. But he couldn’t do that to her. If she were to ever find out what he’d done… Besides, if he could compel her, then any vampire could, and that wasn’t a scenario he even wanted to imagine.

No, he needed to be making sure she took **_more_** vervain.  He needed to slip it into her coffee, sprinkle it onto her breakfast cereal, bake it into cookies. Anything to make sure her mind stayed her own, so that no vampire could snare her in his gaze and make her walk away from him or out of a protected house… or off a gangway. No, she had to come willingly with him or not at all, and no fantasy of feelings growing between them once he had her all to himself full-time could erase the reality that it would never, ever, come true.

So Option Four was out, no matter how much he might want it, no matter how much he thought Operation Eternal Road Trip would give them the best chance. Five Minutes Elena wouldn’t be on that trip, ever, and there was no sense in hoping for what was hopeless. But it was enough to make him weep with frustration and stymied rage.

He found himself, miserable and fighting back tears, perched on one of the buttresses at the top of the Chicago Tribune building. It was high, offered an amazing view of the city, and it made him feel like Batman. What he wouldn’t give right now for a Utility Belt full of Original killing weapons and the Batmobile. He’d make a better Batman than that Christian Bale guy. Sure, Bale was an improvement over Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer, but he didn’t quite capture the tortured existence of the Dark Knight… well, okay, maybe Stefan would make a better Batman, but he’d be Robin because everyone knew it was Robin who swooped in and saved the day anyway. And Robin had the cool Bat-Cycle.

_‘I’d need a mask and a cape, and the entire legion of SuperFriends to pull this clusterfuck out of the fire,’_ he thought to himself, wiping the wetness from his cheeks _. ‘Fuck, I am going insane. I should just let Klaus have her and be done with it.’_

The beast inside him stirred – the demon that fueled his bloodlust and made him more monster than man, and opened its eyes. He almost didn’t recognize it because he’d been keeping it tightly locked up in a cell inside his mind, but it approached the door and looked out the little, barred window.

He bared his teeth at it in defiance, but the idea was there.

Option Five: Give Elena to Klaus.

This option was abhorrent. It made every bit of his heart, and what was left of his soul, scream in denial. And yet, he could not deny that it might be the only option that kept them all alive. They couldn’t fight Klaus. They didn’t know how, and they didn’t have the time it would take to mount a viable defense. Klaus needed Elena’s blood which meant he needed her **_alive_**. Ergo, he couldn’t kill her. If he gave Elena to Klaus, Klaus would have no reason to kill him, Stefan or any of the Mystic Falls Scoobies, and if he promised not to harm any of them it might earn him Elena’s cooperation. Sure, he might not make life pleasant for her, but if **_Stefan_** stayed with them, then his brother could keep watch over her – provided Klaus forgave him for his part in the deception. In the meantime, he and the Scoobies would have the time they needed to figure out how to kill an Original.

There were drawbacks, of course. Klaus would be able to make hybrids, but he’d be able to do that anyway as long as they didn’t go with Options One or Two, so that wasn’t a huge downside. The worst would be that, if he did it, Elena, Stefan, and everyone else on the team would despise him for all eternity. But that was okay, too, because he was used to that. He was used to being the one who made the hard decisions, who ended up saving everyone, but got blamed for all the evil in the world. He’d played that part before, and he knew all the lines. It was the good guy stuff he kept flubbing, and let’s face it, the director hated his ad-libs.

So Option Five was still on the table, as much as he hated it. The only other thing he could think to do was tell Elena everything, and let her try to come up with something. It made perfect sense for him, a 172 year-old vampire with centuries of life experience and fighting/survival skills, and familiarity in dealing with witches, to rely on an 18 year-old human girl to devise a plan to save them all. Right. Because her plans always worked out so well. Given her track record, he should just stake himself now and get it over with.

 

He laughed to himself, a cutting, bitter laugh, and shook his head. He was screwed no matter what he did, it was just a matter of how screwed and how dead, but right now he needed to get back to Elena. He didn’t know what he was going to tell her about his meeting with Gloria, but he knew he’d left her alone for too long. Still concerned about the possibility of someone following him, he made his way back into the building and took the stairs down to the ground floor where he slipped into the Tribune gift store and snagged a baseball cap and a blue windbreaker. Yes, the store was closed, and yes, stealing is wrong, but he used vamp speed and good luck to anyone trying to see anything on the surveillance tapes. He put both the hat and the jacket on before stepping out into the Chicago night, then he immersed himself in the crowds of people milling about along North Michigan Avenue on a cool, Autumn evening.

The Tribune Tower was only a mile or so away from The Drake, straight up North Michigan Avenue and across East Walton, but he took a rambling route back, ducking into stores, going out the back kitchen entrances of restaurants, and what not to insure that anyone trying to follow him would either reveal themselves or lose him. He also had the presence of mind to buy some bourbon and a burn phone, because he knew he was going to need copious liquid fortification to deal with the shit being thrown at him, and he knew Elena would implode if she wasn’t allowed to call home. He also wouldn’t put it past Bitchy Witchy to cast a locator spell and try to hunt them down if Elena didn’t check in sometime soon.

As he approached The Drake from the lakeside, he saw no evidence of his being tailed, but he still scaled the building and went in through a third floor hall window. With his senses on high alert, he sniffed for other vampires, for anyone he knew, and for Power. There was nothing, and he let himself relax just a little bit as he took the stairs up to their level. Once in the corridor of their floor, however, he ran, almost literally, into a busty redhead with legs longer than the Sears Tower as she stepped out of the elevator.

“Oh! I am so sorry!” she apologized, stepping back, but his heightened senses caught her smell, and he was reminded that it had been hours since he’d eaten, and he’d used a lot of energy ducking a non-existent tail tonight.

His beast reached through the bars of its cage and grabbed his wrist in a phantom hold. He winced because he wasn’t expecting it. Ratcheting up his senses up to eleven on a scale of ten had the drawback of having his basal nature very close to the surface, making impulse control spotty at best.

“No problem. No harm done,” he assured her, eyeing her as she eyed him. She was hot. His body was singing, and his bloodlust was hammering out a staccato rhythm in his head. The beast squeezed his wrist and pulled him closer to her.

She batted heavily-mascaraed, green eyes at him and bit her lower lip. His eyes were drawn to the plump, lipsticked flesh as his sluggish blood pooled in his groin. “Thanks. Are you staying in this hotel?” she asked with a suggestive lilt.

The scent of her growing arousal wafted into his sinuses, sending his hunger skyrocketing, and he couldn’t believe he was even considering doing this with all the danger they were in, but it was almost as if he couldn’t resist.

“Yes, just down the hall,” his mouth answered before his brain could stop it. Down the hall, where the girl he loved more than anything waited, no doubt worried sick about her boyfriend, who **_wasn’t_** him.

“Oh. That’s good. So we’re, like, neighbors,” she said, lowering her voice to that husky purr he found irresistible.

He was so fucked. He was so fucked in so many ways, and the likelihood of him dying in the next 48 hours was pretty high, and he knew he had blood bags in the room, but how long would it be before he had another chance for a hot meal? Why not get fucked literally so being in the same room with Elena, surrounded by her scent, wouldn’t drive him more insane than he already was?

His beast smiled, training its eyes on the throbbing pulse point on her neck, as his lips pulled back into his winningest smile.

“How lucky for me,” he answered, leaning close.

She smiled back, all seduction and feminine wiles. “Lucky for **_us_** ,” she corrected as she used her key card to open her door.

He gave Candy four minutes. The maid he didn’t fuck at all. This one he gave fifteen, because he didn’t think taking a short break from the doom and disaster that had been the last few hours was too much to ask. He undressed her, and let her undress him, then he pushed her onto her back on the bed and buried his face in her crotch. He made her come on his tongue, then he bit her in the femoral artery and fingered her to a second orgasm as he fed. When she was still gasping and bucking from her climax, he released her, crawled up her body and mounted her, fucking her hard and fast to a third, and letting himself reach his own frenzied orgasm.

He lay with her for a moment, panting, smelling the sex that swirled around him, feeling at once exhilarated and guilty. Elena was waiting six doors down, and here he was in bed with a strange woman whose name he’d already forgotten. Didn’t matter. She’d forget he ever existed in a few minutes.

He’d never missed Andie more than he did right now, in the afterglow. Fucking was fun, but sex with a well-known partner was better. There were times over the summer when Elena was off with friends, and there were no crises looming over them, when he and Andie would spend all weekend in bed.

He knew what the others thought of their relationship, but Andie hadn’t been **_that_** compelled. She’d genuinely liked him, and she knew her way around a man’s body. And he’d loved her in his own way. He’d shown her the Damon who wasn’t a dick. The one who laughed and flirted and listened to her bitch about her day. The woman had the patience of a saint to deal with the idiot public like she did, and more than once he’d teased her that he would have just ripped some moron’s head off for being so stupid. She’d laugh then and kiss him.

They’d walk around the house naked, and he’d make finger foods: little tea sandwiches and cream cheese stuffed cherry tomatoes and the like that he would feed to her. Once he’d made crepes with fresh strawberries, and he’d brought her breakfast in bed, complete with mimosas. That morning had led to two days of almost non-stop sex including three bottles of champagne, two bottles of wine, three bottles of bourbon, three sheet changes, and a 70 year-old bottle of cognac he knew Stefan was saving for a special occasion. Piss on his douche brother. Stefan had stolen his bottle of 50 year-old scotch back in the Sixties so now they were even.

Andie was all woman. She was mature, and sensible, and smart. So why was he pining for a half-grown girl barely two decades old?

_‘Because sometimes we don’t choose who we love. It just happens to us.’_

Sighing, feeling every single one of his 172 years, he lifted himself up from the bed and gathered his clothes. The redhead rolled to her back and smiled appreciatively.

_‘Leslie. Her name was Leslie,’_ he recalled as he got dressed.

“Same time tomorrow?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. I’m sorry,” he answered and caught her eye before she could protest. “You’ll forget me. I was never here. The wound on your thigh is a spider bite that got infected, but it’s healing now. You had an incredible dream where you had the best sex that you’ve ever had with a stranger, but now it’s time to go back to your life and stop fucking strange men you just met in hotels. That could get you seriously killed.”

“Stop fucking strange men,” she intoned.

“Good girl,” he said with a smile, leaning down to kiss her sweetly. Yeah he could give her a sip and heal her right up, but there were too many women walking around with his blood in them already, and with this one he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t end up going home with a serial killer before his blood was out of her system.

He slipped out of her room and took a short detour to stuff the stolen windbreaker and baseball cap in a housekeeping cart’s trash bag, before steeling himself for the onslaught of teen tirade about to steamroll him, and entered their room.

He half expected her to pounce on him the moment he walked through the door. Instead he found her asleep on one of the beds, Stefan’s diary open beside her. She’d showered, changed into clean jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, and ordered food as was evidenced by her still damp hair and the room service tray on the floor. He took a moment to drink in the sweet sight, indulging in a fantasy of being able to look upon her so unguarded in sleep every day, before going to take a quick shower in the second, unused bathroom.

She was awake when he exited the bathroom, fully clothed with a towel around his neck to catch the droplets of water coming off his wet hair. She’d closed the journal and was now seated on the bed, knees hugged to her chest. She watched him warily as he moved about the room, but she didn’t speak, although he knew she was dying to. He motioned to the room service tray.

“You get enough to eat?” he asked, hoping to avoid the coming conversation for as long as possible. “Cause there’s at least four places I’d like to try out while we’re here.”

“Huh?”

“Food. Y’know that stuff you humans need to survive? Did you get enough of it? Because Guy Fieri reviewed this…”

“Who?”

“Guy Fieri. _Diners, Drive-ins and Dives_ ,” he clarified. She gave him a blank look. “Food Network?”

“Food Network? What? What the hell are you talking about? Damon, you’ve been gone for hours! Did you find Stefan?” she demanded.

So much for a reprieve from the angst and tears.

He grappled with how much to tell her, trying to choose his words carefully. “No. No, I didn’t.” Her face fell, and he rushed to continue. “But he **_is_** here in Chicago. Gloria’s seen him, and she expects him to come into her bar tomorrow night with Klaus.” Her face lit up again, and he dreaded the next words that had to come out of his mouth, but he had to tell her about Rebekah. “But… there’s a problem…”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, trying not to be hurt when she scooted away from him, and began to tell her a very abridged version of the conversation he’d had with Gloria. He told her about how he had learned that Stefan had known Klaus in the Twenties and how Stefan had once been with Klaus’s sister, Rebekah. He left out everything about the bloodletting spell and the fact that Gloria knew how to solve the “hybrid problem.” He still didn’t know what he was going to do about that situation, and he prayed he had more time than the next twenty-four hours to figure it out.

“But… but he couldn’t have known Klaus back then, Damon. I’ve read his diary. He doesn’t mention anyone named Nick or Rebecca,” she argued, searching his face for answers.

“We both know Klaus is capable of compelling a vampire. A vampire like my brother, especially how he was back then, would have easily fallen under his control.”

“You think Stefan was being controlled by Klaus the last time he was here?” she asked, her voice full of hope.

He scowled. Trust Elena to want to blame Klaus for Stefan’s Ripper Douche ways. “No, Elena,” he said firmly, making her look at him. “I think Klaus compelled Stefan to **_forget_** he knew them.”

He saw her draw a shaky breath, as if she was intending to argue, but then she must have seen the hard look in his eyes and thought the better of it. Still, her lips tightened into a thin line.

“If that’s the case, **_why_** did he do that? Why did he make Stefan forget?”

“That is the million dollar question, and one I would be very interested in knowing the answer to.”

“So what do we do? Especially now that this Rebekah is back? You said you knew her?”

“I knew **_of_** her. I never met her. I steered clear of her based on her reputation alone. She was, by all accounts, an impulsive, spoiled, vindictive bitch who was as unpredictable as my brother.”

“She sounds like Katherine…” Elena blurted, her voice thoughtful until she realized what she’d said and looked mortified. “Damon, I didn’t mean…”

He frowned because she wasn’t that far off the mark. “It’s ok. I know what you meant, but no, Rebekah wasn’t anything like Katherine. Katherine was a spoiled, vindictive bitch, yeah, but she was also calculating and manipulative. Katherine could dick you over and stab you in the back, and you would never have seen it coming. Rebekah was vengeful and blunt. She killed without remorse, reason or hesitation. She was as much a slave to her desires as Stefan was; it was why they were so suited to each other.”

“They were lovers?” she asked in an uncertain voice.

“Yes. To the best of my knowledge, Stefan and Rebekah were more than just friends. And believe me when I tell you to be glad Klaus erased my brother’s memory of that time, because if half of the rumors I’d heard about them were true, they would’ve made the diary entries you read in Stefan’s little book of blues look like a Sunday picnic.”

She drew another breath, rolling her shoulders back and lifting her chin into her “defiant” pose. “Okay. Okay, then. What do we do? How do we get Stefan back?”

He wanted to tell her that they didn’t, that Stefan was gone and they had to let him go, but he knew she would never believe him. That was a lesson she was going to have to learn on her own, probably the hard way.

“I don’t know yet,” he replied honestly, because it was true. He hadn’t decided on which of his options he was going to choose. “But we have until tomorrow night to come up with a plan.”

She was silent for a moment, searching his face, then she nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay,” he agreed and stood up, turning his back to her so he could rummage in the bags he’d brought in from his earlier shopping.

“Damon,” he heard her begin, and he immediately reached for the bottle of bourbon. “About earlier. What I said when we checked in…”

He didn’t speak. Instead he tensed his shoulders and poured himself a hefty drink into one of the glass tumblers the hotel provided. No cheap-ass plastic cups for guests of The Drake. No way.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for and out of line. I know you’ve been trying to be better…”

He almost spit the bourbon out, but he managed to swallow it without spewing it all over the window that looked out over Lake Michigan. She didn’t seem to notice.

“And you **_have_** been so much better. And I **_was_** trying to change you. I know you’re not Stefan, and I don’t want you to be Stefan. I didn’t mean…”

He turned around because her floundering was becoming too painful.

“Look, don’t worry about it. You say things you don’t mean. I **_do_** things I don’t mean. We’re even. We can skip the heart-to-heart.” He tossed her the disposable cell phone which she caught in mid-air. “Here. Use that and call home. Frankly, I’m surprised Witchy hasn’t magicked a note to you yet.”

She looked guilty and held up a scrap of paper that she’d been hiding under the journal. It read, “You okay? Calvary ready for rescue from caveman if needed.”

He rolled his eyes and knocked back his drink as Elena smiled and activated the burn phone. A minute later, he heard her talking to Witchy, telling her she’d gotten the note and filling her in. He tuned out most of it, returning his attention to the lake. It was pitch dark over the water, but his vampire eyes could pick out ships in the distance and the faint lights of buoys marking the shipping lanes. He watched them, letting his mind wander as he allowed Elena’s voice wash over him.

How much longer would he be able to hear it? Or see her? Or smell her scent? How many more times would they make crappy chili in the Gilbert kitchen or go on road trips or argue or do any of the things that had begun to give his life meaning again? He knew his time with her was running short. No matter which option he chose, none of them ended too well for him. It was just a matter of which one would leave them both alive.

Elena would probably go for Option Three, which all but guaranteed his death. After so many times of being able to find another way, he figured they’d used up all of their “pull off the impossible” cards, and he couldn’t imagine that he’d luck out again. She’d live, but Klaus would have her, and he’d die, and while he’d die for her, if it meant it would save her, he wasn’t about to die for her for nothing.

He wanted Option Four, but there was no way he was going to get it. Period. Maybe, **_maybe,_** if he got a Winnebago and shoved the entire Mystic Falls Scooby gang into it, Elena might consider running, but they wouldn’t get very far. Good luck trying to disappear with that bunch. If they posed as a traveling band of idiots, they might be able to join a circus… in Romania.

He shook his head and poured another drink. From the sound of it, Elena was now yammering to Ric, steadily making her way through her Top Five list. Blondie would probably be next. He sighed and looked back out over Lake Michigan. Maybe if he stared at it long enough, the Lady of The Lake would take pity on him and lob an Original killing magic sword his way. Stranger things had happened.

He held back a laugh, the hysteria bubbling just under the surface. This situation was so screwed up it had him wishing for Batman and Avalon.

_‘I read too much,’_ he sighed to himself. Anyone who had ever been in his room knew he was as avid a bookworm as his brother, he just didn’t advertize it. Too bad none of his books held the secret to solving this puzzle.

_‘There’s always Option Five,’_ a gravelly voice whispered in his head.

He looked at his reflection in the glass and saw the beast in him peering out through the bars of its cage. He shuddered, rejecting the option out of hand, and leaned forward to rest his head on the window. The glass was cool against his forehead. The bourbon was warm going down his throat. Elena’s voice was a both a balm and an ache to his heart. He had no idea what to do.

He closed his eyes and prayed for clarity.

 


	9. Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

 

Four a.m. found him still awake, sitting in a chair by the window, glass of bourbon in his hand. He had already finished off one bottle, and he was about one third of the way through the second. Somewhere along the line, he’d drained three blood bags, too, as evidenced by the empty packages in the trash, but he must have done that out of habit because he had no clear memory of it. Elena was curled up in the bed furthest from him. She had passed out about 2 a.m., but he couldn’t sleep. Sleeping meant letting down his guard, and he still half expected an attack of some sort. It also meant missing some of his final moments with the girl he loved.

He’d spent the past several hours tumbling all of his options in his head, hoping to catch a facet of one of them that he hadn’t seen before, but so far, it all amounted to the same boatload of nothing. He wanted to reach out, to call Ric or Witchy, but to do so would mean spilling what he knew, and neither of them could be trusted not to squeal to Elena. Besides, both of them hated him right now and would rather set him on fire than answer a call from him. He had gotten used to the idea that he was alone in this, but that, too, was familiar territory. For years he’d known that the only person he could trust was himself. Stefan had made sure of that on the night they became vampires. It had only been recently when he’d been reluctantly drafted onto Team Scooby Mystic Falls, and, while it had been nice to have others to go to, they’d never really accepted him, and they’d only tolerated him because of his badass skills and because Elena had said so. Ric had been the only one of the bunch who he’d even thought of considering as a friend, and well… their bromance was going through a rough patch.

So he was back on Team Damon Salvatore, roster of one, and stuck with the burden of trying to save everyone – again, without anyone really knowing he was doing it – again, and probably dying in the process – again. Regardless, he’d definitely lose Elena. Whether she went back to Stefan, or got captured by Klaus, or he died, the end for him was always the same: living or undead, he lost Elena. Which meant he had to make the best choice for Elena, even if it meant he’d never see her again, even if it meant that she would hate him or that he’d die, even if the best choice seemed like the worst one at the beginning. He was always good at seeing the bigger picture.

He wasn’t killing her or turning her, so there went Options One and Two. All that remained then were Three and Five because he knew Option Four was out. Unless he wanted to keep Elena compelled or live with the constant fear that she’d slip away from him and run back to Mystic Falls, there was no way he would be able to implement Operation Eternal Road Trip. Knowing her, she’d leave a “Help, I’ve been kidnapped!” message at a truck stop somewhere and bring the FBI down on him. Yeah, Not Around Me! Elena would definitely do that.

The tragedy was, she might run for Stefan. If their places were swapped, and Stefan was the one asking her to run, she might just do it. Then again, all she’d have to do to get his pathetic brother to roll over and show his belly would be for her to bat her doe eyes at him and say pretty please.

Elena, 18 year-old **_human_** , Elena, had never been very good at seeing the big picture. She couldn’t foresee the different endgames based on multiple factors and changing circumstances. She didn’t have the life experience or the strategic skills it took to plan for any contingency. That was where Klaus had gotten them, and Damon would be damned if he’d let the Original-Were out-think him again. If Klaus hatched plans within plans, then Damon Salvatore would match him. He would have whole sets of Russian nesting dolls in plans, all waiting to be revealed as needed.

The first would be dealing with whatever Elena came up with as a good course of action. Knowing her the way he did, she’d hatch some hair-brained plan that involved vervaining Stefan just like they’d done the last time he’d fallen off the wagon. To do that, they would have to get Stefan alone, and no doubt he’d be the one on distract Klaus duty. The biggest wild card in that plan, aside from **_everything_** , was Rebekah. He didn’t know much about the girl other than what he’d already told Elena, so he wasn’t sure what would work to draw her away from Klaus and Stefan. He probably ought to take them out one at a time rather than trying to face both Originals at once, but he really wouldn’t know what he was dealing with until he got there.

He didn’t have high hopes for it working out any better for him than the last time he’d gone up against the Original, but he might be able to buy Elena enough time to get Stefan. Maybe. No, not really. The plan was suicide, but he doubted Elena would see reason. Miss Teen Know-it-All had all the answers. She knew everything.

It all came back to the fact that he didn’t want to die for her if he couldn’t be sure his death would buy her safety. If his death would mean nothing, and she’d end up Klaus’ prisoner anyway, he may as well just go with Option Five, because it at least gave him a chance at living long enough to find a way to kill an Original and rescue her.

The problem was he didn’t know if he could bring himself to give her over.

 _‘Let me out,’_ his beast said. _‘I can do it. I can take the hatred she will have for us.’_

 _‘I can, too. I can play the bad guy same as you,’_ he countered.

_‘You’re weak. You could never betray her like that. Give over to me. Turn off your emotions, and let me take care of everything. I promise you won’t feel the guilt.’_

He shook his head. “No,” he whispered, finishing off his drink.

The beast snarled and rattled the cage doors, but he held firm.

_‘You’re going to lose her anyway. Why torture yourself like this?’_

_‘Because even if pain is all I know, it’s still **my** pain and I own it.’_

_‘Stupid fool. You don’t have the balls to do this. You’re as pathetic as your weakling brother. That girl will be the death of you both.’_

He poured another drink and swallowed it in one gulp, feeling the burn and mentally slamming the little sliding door on the barred cell window shut to block out the beast’s accusing, mocking eyes. The worst of it was the monster was right, and there was no getting around it. No matter what happened, chances were this was the last day he and Elena would have together. Whether he decided on Option Three or Five, by the end of tonight nothing would be the same between them. He knew that, even if his heart recoiled and screamed its denial to the deaf Heavens. Today would be the last day for Damon and Elena.

So was it so awful of him to want to spend it happy? To make his last memories of “them” pleasant ones before he had to let them all go; to consign himself to the darkness once again? He didn’t want to close his eyes, didn’t want to look away from her for a moment and miss a single second. His vampire mind remembered **_everything_** , and he wanted these final hours to be etched in his memory forever.

She made a distressed noise in her sleep, and he was by her side in an instant. Her brow was furrowed, and she was making small jerking movements that led him to believe that she was having a bad dream.

“Shhhh. I’m here,” he whispered in her ear, and she began to settle down, instinctively reacting to the sound of his voice. This, of course, twisted him up in even tighter, stronger knots than he already was.

His eyes fell to her necklace resting just above the swell of her breasts, and his hand was on it before he could even think about it. He started to pull his fingers away when his beast stopped him, and he found himself deftly removing it instead.

 _‘What are you doing?’_ he demanded of himself as his hand placed the pendant on the bedside table.

 _‘Relax. Nothing you do will hurt her,’_ his beast replied. _‘Besides, you need this.’_

 _‘No…’_ he argued, but he was already leaning over her, breathing in her warm sleep-scent.

“Sleep,” he commanded, knowing her brain would register the order.

Confident that she wouldn’t awaken, he crawled into bed beside her and pulled her to him, her back to his chest. Tucking her into the curve of his body, he spooned around her and draped his arm across her torso, placing his head beside hers on the pillow.

Everything about him calmed the moment he had her safe in his arms. All the chaos and confusion, and raging pain stampeding through him, settled as he took in her scent and matched his breathing to her own. He was so in tune with her, he would not have been surprised if their heart beats synchronized.

It was wrong of him, he knew. If she ever found out that he’d done this, she’d be furious and kick his ass, but his beast was right. He **_needed_** this. He needed to hold her, just once, before he threw himself into the fire. He needed these last few hours of perfect peace before everything went to shit again.

She was so warm, and she smelled like home. He snuggled close, burying his nose into her hair and breathing deep, as he closed his eyes and let her lull him to sleep.

He woke a couple of hours later, his eyes focusing on the glimmer of sunrise through the window. There was a faint glow on the horizon, lighting on the waters of the lake, and if he could have willed it to stop, he would have. His vampire instincts screamed at him to run from the coming day, but he was well used to ignoring them. He was grateful for his Daylight Ring protecting him from the harmful rays of the sun. He knew 99-percent of other vampires were now scurrying to their hidey-holes while he could watch the sunrise without fear of being burned to a crisp.

Not too long ago, but in another life it seemed, he’d purposely tried to immolate himself. That was when the werewolf poison was ravaging his body, and he was damned if was going to go out like Rose. But that was before the “cure,” and the mess they found themselves in now. Elena had been willing to admit her feelings for him that night, when she’d thought he’d been about to die. She’d even kissed him. But then he didn’t die, and now she had to deal with her admissions, and wasn’t it all so inconvenient for her?

How lucky he was to have lived. Yippee. It struck him that Blondie had never once said thank you for his saving them that night, or for taking the bite that would have killed her just as surely as it would have killed him. That’s gratitude for you, but he’d come to expect it. These humans, they made demands, they expected the impossible, but when he gave it to them, they shrugged and acted like what he’d done was no big deal.

The light got brighter, and the sky started to turn orange and yellow with the coming dawn. He wrapped his arm tighter around Elena and pulled her deeper into the shadows. He didn’t want the light to touch them, because the moment it did, the night would be over, and he’d have to face their last day. He tracked the steady progression of the sunlight as it came streaming through the eastern-facing window, spreading across the carpet of the hotel room until it reached the bed.

He watched, not breathing, as it finally lit on their bodies, turning the cream colored bedspread a buttery yellow. The light reached his foot, and he was like Navarre in _Ladyhawke_. Now he would turn into a wolf and never be able to touch her again.

Sighing, feeling exhausted and heartsick, he reluctantly released her and refastened her necklace about her neck, ending her compulsion, and he was off the bed and back in his chair by the window long before she opened her eyes. He watched her, a sad, secret smile on his lips as she sat up and stretched, her jaw opening in a yawn.

“Mornin’,” he greeted with false cheer, saluting her with his refilled glass.

“Ugh,” she groaned, squinting at the sunlight in her eyes as she tried to focus on him.

He smirked and sloshed the bourbon around the tumbler. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”

She scowled, but said nothing as she hopped out of bed and shuffled over to one of the bathrooms. He heard the door close and lock behind her, and he chuckled at her naiveté. A few minutes later she came out and slumped back down on the bed, peering at the bedside clock.

“7 a.m.?”

“Mmm hmmm,” he confirmed, batting his eyes at her over the rim of his glass.

His attempts at flirting fell flat because he wasn’t fooling her, and he knew it.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” she asked.

He shrugged and put his glass down on the table by the window. “Couple of hours,” he replied. _‘Snuggled next to you. Happiest two hours of my life.’_

“You gonna be okay?”

“Never better. Sleep deprivation is a hobby of mine these days.”

She rolled her eyes then drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs.

“So… what’s the plan?” she asked.

“Plan? We have a plan?”

“Damon…” she chided, frowning.

“Okay. Okay. First I was thinking breakfast. There’s this pancake place over on East Bellevue that makes the world’s most awesome apple pancakes. You’ll love it.”

“Damon!” she scolded. “Enough about breakfast. What are we going to do about **_Stefan?_** ”

He grimaced and shook his head. “Stefan? Why do we have to do anything about Stefan? It’s going to be a gorgeous day. Let’s go to the zoo.”

**_“Damon!”_ **

He made a show of sighing and looking much put-upon. “Relax, Elena. There’s nothing we can do about my pathetic, little, Klaus-bitch of a brother until tonight, so there’s no sense in getting your panties in a bunch about him. We have all day. We can sit here in this hotel room and mope, or we can go out and enjoy the day. I vote for enjoying.”

“You would,” she sneered. “And Stefan is not pathetic, or have you forgotten that the only reason he’s in this situation is because he had to save you.”

“And the only reason I needed saving was because Blondie insisted I save Wolf-boy. If I’d left him chained up where Klaus had put him, I wouldn’t have gotten bit!” he shot back angrily. Why did everyone forget that half the hard decisions and clusterfucks he’d had to get them out of were due to other people making piss-poor choices!

“And the only reason you had to release them…” she began.

“Was to make sure Klaus couldn’t use them as the vampire and werewolf part of his little blood ritual,” he interrupted, cutting her off. Regardless of whether or not he’d fed her his blood that night, Klaus still had intended on using Caroline and Tyler as the sacrifices, and if she had been about to hint otherwise then she was more delusional than he thought.

She seemed to understand his point and stopped her little rant. “Okay, that’s true.”

He nodded, then offered some sympathy. “I wish I could have known that he’d have a back-up plan. I should have been able to predict that he’d go after Jenna.”

Elena shook her head. “No. I was shocked by it too. Elijah really liked Jenna. I never thought he’d let Klaus hurt her. It just goes to show that no one is safe around him, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants.”

“Yeah.” _‘Which is why I need to do whatever it takes to protect you and keep you alive.’_

“I’m sorry I snapped at you. You know me. I’m cranky in the morning,” she apologized.

He made a show of sniffing the air. “And you might be PMS’ing too. Getting to be that time of the month.”

“Damon! Ugh!” she gasped, throwing a pillow at him even as he grinned. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

“I’ll stay here in my chair, drink my bourbon, and try not to have impure thoughts,” he teased, waggling his eyebrows.

“Ass,” she shot over her shoulder as she gathered some clothes and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Why yes, and it’s a very nice one if you’d care to see it.”

“Dream on!” she yelled as she shoved the bathroom door shut.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he sing-songed, chuckling.

“Pffft!”

He laughed and patted himself on the back for a successful diversion. He didn’t know how long he could keep her from obsessing about his brother, but he was going take it as far as he could go.

She came out of the bathroom a half hour later clothed in jeans and a modest top and smelling of flowers. It reminded him of the TV ads that had women faking orgasms in the shower while washing their hair with some “natural’ shampoo. What was it? Natural Essence? No, **_Herbal_** _Essences._ That was it. Too bad she didn’t treat him to the sound of a fake orgasm in the shower just now. That might be something Five Minutes Elena might do to him… after a few shots. 

He scowled and put down his drink, looking over at the second bottle of bourbon and realizing that it was mostly gone.

_‘Drinking too much. Need to stop. Need to keep a clear head.’_

In his mind, he heard his beast laughing.

“So… I was thinking…” she began as she sat on the bed and faced him.

Then again, maybe he wasn’t drunk enough, he decided, reaching for the bottle.

She continued when he didn’t answer. “We have several vervain darts. I was figuring, we could knock him out with one of them just long enough to get him in the car and back to Mystic Falls.”

And he’d been right. She was going for the Wild Stefan Hunt Plan. Because his brother was too stupid to see that coming since it wasn’t like she hadn’t stabbed him in the back, literally, the last time he’d fallen off the wagon. He debated whether or not to laugh outright or try to make her figure it out for herself, but he knew if he laughed at her, she’d just get obstinate and bitchy.

“He might not fall for it this time, and the darts might not work. Stefan’s high on human blood,” he reminded, using a careful tone of voice.

She shook her head in denial and crossed her arms over her chest. “He was high on human blood before, and we knocked him out.”

“Yea, but that was like him binge-drinking a keg. Now he’s consumed the whole brewery. I asked Ric to up the dose of the darts, but I have no idea if it’ll be enough,” he countered, sipping his drink.

She threw up her hands in a huff the way she usually did when he shot down one of her oh-so-brilliantly-thought-out plans with basic logic and facts.

“Well, it’s all we have. Bonnie’s not here to witchy migraine him, and you pissed off our other vampire hunter by killing him…”

“Temporarily!”

“Ugh! It doesn’t matter! You still **_killed_** him!”

“He **_pissed_** me off!”

“I am not arguing this with you! If you can’t see why it’s wrong, I can’t explain it to you.”

 _‘And if you can’t see why stringing along a 172 year-old vampire, and treating him like your dog is wrong, I can’t explain it to **you** ,’_ he thought dourly, downing his drink. _‘Hmm, looks like I’m gonna need another bottle…’_

“Look, whatever. We agreed not to fight, so I won’t fight. If you think my plan won’t work, I’m open to suggestions,” she said.

_‘I’ve got a great plan. Fool proof plan. It’s called: Let’s Get the Hell out of Here, and Never Look Back plan. Forget my douche brother. Forget Mystic Falls. It’ll be just you and me, Baby, and I’ll take you on the wildest ride you’ve ever been on.’_

But those words didn’t leave his lips.

“If we’re going to get Stefan, we have to get him away from Klaus. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. And I still have no idea what to do if Rebekah is there,” he replied.

She shrugged. “I figured she’d be easy. You’d just do your flirty, little eye thing at her, and she’ll be eating out of your hands.”

“I’m going to forget that you just asked me to man-whore myself out to an Original bitch vampire who is ten times older than me, and who can split me open and eat my liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti in five seconds flat, just so you can get your boyfriend back,” he retorted with a sneer.

She gasped and looked away. She’d never been able to face him when he called her on her bullshit.

“I’m sorry. You’re right. That was a stupid thing to say,” she whispered, chastised.

He shrugged and took another drink. “It might work. The ladies **_do_** love me,” he admitted with a cocky smirk that didn’t reach his eyes. He was actually stewing in quiet rage, but the rage was helping him. If he was angry, he could do this.

She didn’t answer, just kept looking at her hands in her lap. Her drying hair had slipped forward to hide her face, but he could smell the blood rushing to her cheeks so he knew she had blushed. As always, the sight of her unhappiness twisted his pathetic, lovesick, undead heart, and he relented.

“I was planning to call Gloria about an hour before we were thinking of showing up at the bar, to see if Stefan and his entourage were there, and hopefully to have her give me a lay of the land. Gloria has no love for Klaus, but she likes me, and she is concerned for Stefan. I think she is on our side,” he told her.

“Just **_think_**?” Elena pressed, raising her gaze to meet his. She still looked haunted and chagrined.

“She’s a witch. They can be a little duplicitous,” he admitted with a roll of his eyes.

“You…” She paused and seemed to be gathering her thoughts. “You seem to know a lot about witches and magic.”

He gave her a look that said he thought **_she_** looked like an idiot, and a stoned one at that. “In case you happened to miss it during last year’s Katherine’s-Not-In-The-Tomb debacle, Emily Bennett **_owed_** me because I saved her kids from being torched when the mob burned her at the stake. I made sure they were safe, and I watched over them until their very natural deaths many, many years later. When they came of age, I found teachers for them that taught them how to use their witch powers. Both of them were very gifted witches in their own right, and they taught me quite a bit about magic, how to sense it, how to fight it and how to manipulate it.”

He locked eyes with her and held them, making sure she was **_listening_** to his every word. “So when I say that I know something about witches and magic, and how Bitchy Baby Witchy is working above her pay grade, and messing with energies she doesn’t understand, and isn’t using properly, it’s because I **_do_**. Only a novice witch wouldn’t have protected herself from an astral possession like the kind Emily pulled off. A trained witch would have recognized the signs and booted the interloper out before she even got a claw in.”

“Emily wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been desperate,” Elena argued.

“She broke an oath. I upheld my end of the deal. You can be sure Emily’s getting hell for it over on the Otherside. Oaths like that aren’t made to be broken,” he warned.

“You can’t honestly tell me that it would have been all right to let all of those tomb vampires out in Mystic Falls!” she yelled, her eyes wide in disbelief.

“And **_you_** can’t honestly tell **_me_** that me and my brother weren’t capable of staking 26 desiccated vampires that had been trapped in there for 145 years without any blood! Maybe, **_maybe_** , I would’ve let Pearl live because Anna was there, and Pearl was always decent to me. But the others…” He made a motion of slitting his throat with his finger, complete with sound effects. “So, no, I don’t buy it. Emily broke her oath to me. I upheld my end of the deal, and she weaseled out. What I want to know is why she didn’t know Katherine wasn’t in there.”

“Katherine said before that she wanted Klaus to think she was dead. It’s possible she didn’t tell Emily on purpose so that no one would know she was still alive,” she offered.

He nodded, taking another drink. “And it would be just like the lying, selfish bitch, too.” He stopped short as a very disturbing epiphany hit him. “Ohhhh.”

“What?” Elena asked immediately, and he was secretly pleased that she could still read him so quickly and well.

“I wouldn’t put it past her to have tipped off the mob that Emily was a witch either. Now **_that_** would have been a reason why Emily broke her oath: if Katherine was the one who’d betrayed her.”

Elena grimaced and looked away. “That’s awful. I can’t believe anyone would be that heartless and cruel as to take a mother away from her children.”

“I know how to pick ‘em,” he said, smiling without mirth. “But you have to admit it makes sense. With Emily dead, the only other person who knew she was still alive was gone. Her secret was safe.”

“You knew she wasn’t dead, even if you didn’t know she wasn’t in the tomb,” Elena pointed-out.

“It’s possible that Katherine didn’t know about the tomb until much later. She supposedly seduced the guard before the Council had even dragged the vampires into the church. I didn’t beg Emily to save her until the following day when Council was preparing to set the church on fire,” he replied.

“I guess I sort of understand, but I just don’t know how she could have left you and Stefan on your own like that. That night she brought the cure, she admitted to loving you both. Why didn’t she ever try to find you?” Elena said thoughtfully.

“Katherine doesn’t know what love is. The only one she loves is herself,” he snapped. “Anything that didn’t fit into her selfish plan was something to be thrown away.” _‘ **I** was something to be thrown away. I’m disposable. Why? Why can’t anyone love **me?** ’_

He slapped his hand on his thigh and stood up. “But enough about my ex. I don’t want to think about Katherine. I don’t want to think about Klaus, or his bitchy sister or my Klaus-whipped brother. I want pancakes. I am not planning a rescue on an empty stomach.”

“I could go for some breakfast,” she agreed, hopping off the bed.

They were strangely in tune for once, and he wondered what had triggered it. It was almost like they’d used to be, during the summer when they were together nearly all the time, and their friendship was stronger than it had ever been. But that was before her birthday, and the Founder’s party, and all the crazy fucked-up-ness that had consumed his life for the last week. He hadn’t really let himself feel the loss, but he did feel it. He missed **_his_** Elena and Ric so much.

For a moment she looked at him, and she was his Elena again. All the badness and resentment he had felt for her earlier disappeared, and he just allowed himself to feel how much he loved her. She was everything to him that Katherine was, but so much more. Losing her was going to be like ripping his own spleen out.

_‘Katherine has no idea how to love someone enough to take their hatred if it means that person lives; or to love someone so much he’d die for her.’_

He offered her his arm the way he had on her birthday, and she slipped her elbow into his.

“Let’s go get some pancakes,” she stated.

“Your wish is my command, m’lady.”

She smiled a big, toothy smile and got that cocky, teasing look on her face that he loved so much. “I like the sound of that.”

“Yeah, well. Don’t get used to it.”

 


	10. Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

 

They walked to the pancake place because it really was just a few blocks away, and it was easier than trying to find parking for the Camaro. In truth, it probably would have taken longer to find a spot and park the car than it did to actually walk there, and Elena was used to jogging in the mornings so the exercise was good for her. Even though the sun was out, it was still a little chilly, so Damon draped his leather jacket over Elena’s shoulders to keep her warm. In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have because now her scent would be imbued in the leather, and he would be reminded of her every time he put it on. In light of his current state of mind, that could either be his salvation or his curse.

The breakfast crowd was just getting into full swing when they arrived, so they didn’t have to wait too long for a table, and a nice hostess with a sunny smile too cheerful for the early hour sat them in a spot towards the back of the dining room. Elena took a few minutes to look over the menu, but he already knew what he was going to order, so when the waitress came they were ready.

The coffee was good, but the pancakes were better, and the two of them managed to have a perfectly pleasant, enjoyable breakfast without any screaming or near death experiences. Damon wasn’t sure if it was because they were both on their best behavior or because Fate was giving him a brief respite before clobbering him in the balls, but he’d take what he could get. They even traded banter and tastes of each other’s food as he gave her some of his apple pancakes, and she shared a bite or two of her chocolate chip ones. He couldn’t decide which he liked better.

“Mmmmm. I love chocolate,” Elena said, licking off her fork.

His eyes fixated on her tongue as it cleaned between the tines, and his brain momentarily short-circuited. _‘And I love how you love it…’_ he thought. “My father would order chocolates for my mother from Richmond. It was a rare treat for us when I was a boy,” he replied, smiling to himself at the memory of sitting on his mother’s knee while she gave him tiny tastes of the delicacy. Of course, what passed for chocolate now bore almost no resemblance to the confections his mother would dole out in precious morsels between secretive giggles.

He saw Elena’s face change, and he realized what he had just said, regretting it immediately because he had exposed a part of himself that he hadn’t wanted to share. He was already emotionally pulling himself back when she looked up at him.

“Stefan doesn’t talk about your mother much,” she said.

“She died when he was very young. He barely remembers her,” he stated, trying to deflect the conversation away from a subject he knew would flay him raw.

“But you do,” she prompted leadingly.

He frowned, staring down into the blackness of his coffee and trying not to hear the gloating chuckle of his beast taunting him. “I was nine when the fever took her.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Father was never the same,” he admitted. _‘And I lost the only person who has ever loved me unconditionally.’_

“I miss my mom and dad every day. And now with Jenna gone…”

“Don’t,” he ordered, jolting her out of her little trip down Memory Lane. She startled and stared at him, and he continued with a harsh edge to his voice. “Don’t go there. Don’t torture yourself. You’ll have time to grieve and make peace with your loss after we’ve gotten Stefan back and we’re dancing on Klaus’ grave. Until then, don’t think about it. Just stick it in a box marked ‘later’ and move on.”

“Is that how you do it? Just stick it in a box and forget about it?” she countered with just a hint of irritation.

Anger surged through him, but he tamped it down. “I do whatever works. Right now, we don’t have the luxury of being distracted by our feelings. We need to be rational and come up with a plan.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “You? Rational? Do you even know the meaning of that word?” she said.

The rant was on his lips; the blistering retort that would strip the smirk from her face and lay bare all of her self-centered, self-important bullshit for the utter crap it was, but he held it back. He was so proud of himself. Instead, he placed his fork down with deliberate slowness and folded his hands under his chin so that the tips of his fingers brushed his lower lip. Then he met her gaze and stared at her.

It took all of ten seconds before she started to flush and lower her eyes. Her head dipped down, and she did that nervous sweep of her hair behind one ear that told him she had realized her mistake. It was an epiphany, really. By not calling her out on her idiocy, he could actually make her call herself out on it. It was a trick he wished he’d figured out months ago. Now it was too late.

“Um…”

Okay, he couldn’t help himself. He was in sharing mode this morning because he knew the day was most likely going to end in her tears or his death, and that made him honest.

“You mean like **_your_** rational plans, Elena?” he asked, the edge of his voice a razor meant to cut to the quick. “You know, the ones that involve you sacrificing yourself, going behind my brother and my backs, and traipsing out into the middle of nowhere on a full moon in a forest full of werewolves? Those rational plans?”

He saw her gather her steam, saw her eyes flash with that Petrova fire that she kept banked so well, and his heart soared to see her beautiful in her anger, but he was even more impressed when he saw her rein it in and calm herself down.

“Point taken,” she responded, and he got a glimpse of the woman the girl would become. He wanted desperately to see it. She was a precious flower on the verge of blossoming, a rare and magnificent orchid on the cusp of maturity. He wanted to be part of it; he wanted to bear witness to all Elena **_could_** be, to all **_they_** could be.

 _‘Run with me!’_ he wanted to beg. _‘Run with me and leave it behind. Let me show you the world. Let me show you myself. Let me show you **us**.’_

But it wasn’t to be. His Elena was the one she kept hidden in the shadows, the one she was ashamed and afraid of because she was the one who took chances and lived freely, and that Elena had died on the night her parents drove off the Wickery Bridge.

“Speaking of irrational plans…” she began, shaking him out of his hopeless yearning. “Any new ideas now that you don’t have an empty stomach?”

He sighed and took a sip of his coffee – also an item that bore little resemblance to the drink he knew as coffee in the late 1800’s. “Not really.”

She nodded and looked away. The waitress came by to top off their mugs, and he smiled at her. She smiled back.

“Do you…” Elena began after the woman walked away. She let the sentence hang, but her meaning was clear.

He shook his head. “No. I’m not hungry. I fed well last night.”

“I saw the bags in the trash. It looked like you binged a bit. On bourbon, too.”

That she could speak so causally of his drinking habits spoke of how comfortable they were with each other when the pressures of the world weren’t squeezing the life out of them. He’d put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to keep housekeeping out while they were gone, but he’d emptied the room’s trash in the dumpster behind the hotel just as a precaution.

“Old habits,” he said with a shrug.

She nodded, taking a drink of her coffee. “Are you afraid?” she asked suddenly in a voice that sounded far too old for her years.

“Yes.” It was one word, but it said everything.

She fell silent, and they finished their breakfast. Damon paid the bill, and they exited out onto the waking city. It was rush hour now, and the streets were full of honking cars and pedestrians trying to get to work. Almost unbidden, he headed east with Elena in tow, aiming for the lakeside and the trail that skirted the shoreline. He wanted to be out of the noise and overwhelming smell of diesel fumes and bustling humanity, because his mind was in too much turmoil to police his senses. Everything was dialed up to eleven again, and he could hear the businessman in the cab puttering down the street as he yelled to his secretary over his cell phone.

“Damon? Are you okay?” his personal demon asked as they stopped at crosswalk to wait for traffic to clear.

“I’m fine,” he assured her, although he didn’t think she believed him. “Let’s take a walk by the lake. Nothing’s open until 10 a.m. anyway.”

He saw her nod, and they meandered their way to Lake Michigan. It was a clear day with a brisk breeze that helped to blow away the industrial scents coming off the city and the wharfs. Underneath the chemical and rotted odors was the smell of the Lake herself, a unique scent that only she possessed, and he breathed in a huge lungful of it to clear his head.

“It’s beautiful,” he heard Elena comment as she stood next to him.

He looked down and allowed himself to feel how right it was that she would be there at his shoulder. Stefan always kept her behind him, never realizing that her best place was at his side.

“You’ve never seen it?” he asked.

She shook her head, and the wind took her hair, playing with it. “Never really been anywhere.”

“Really?” he asked, incredulous. Her family was well-to-do. They should have been taking family vacations to Europe every summer.

“Really.”

“California?”

“Nope.”

“New York?”

“Nope.”

“Europe?”

“My dad took us to France when I was sixteen. We were in Paris for a week,” she admitted.

“There you go. Did you go to Italy?”

“Nuh uh,” she answered with a shake of her head.

“You have to have gone to Disney World.”

“Last time was when Jeremy was ten. We were on It’s A Small World when it broke down. We were stuck for almost a half hour before they could get it moving again. I kept hearing that damn song in my head for weeks,” she replied, a pained look on her face.

He laughed. “I would have gotten out of the boat to rip out the dolls and put them into compromising positions.”

She laughed with him and shook her head. “You would too. Some poor mom and dad with their kids would’ve been on the boat and passed a scene fit for an X-rated movie.”

“That’s me. Damon Salvatore, corrupting today’s youth one Disney ride at a time. You should have seen what I did on the Matterhorn in Disneyland.”

“I don’t want to know,” she insisted, smiling.

He waggled his eyebrows at her. “I could give you a demonstration.”

**_“Damon!”_ **

He grinned and motioned for her to follow him. “C’mon. You’ve never been here. Let me show you my Chicago.”

XXXXXX

They did go to the zoo, wandering along the walkways of one of the United States’ oldest animal parks. It had been there in the 20’s when he was first living in the city, but it was much improved now. He took her past the exhibits, letting her dictate what she wanted to see, and she spent a good amount of time cooing over the animals in the petting zoo. He made a mental note to get her a pony should the opportunity arise just to see her go gaga over the fuzzy, little hay burner again. Either that or a sheep, but ponies smelled better, especially when wet.

Afterwards, they rode the bus because, amazingly, his little Founding Family Princess had never ridden on a public transit bus or trolley before, and he watched, amused, as she tried to remain standing when the bus lurched to its stops and starts. He regaled her with tales of steam trains and the San Francisco cable cars, and horse-drawn wagons as they lumbered along on the short trip. She asked questions that he realized she had never asked Stefan about history, about what they had seen, and the eras they had lived through.

Stefan didn’t like to talk about his past or the history he had witnessed, but Damon had no compunction about answering Elena’s questions as they made their way back to Oak Street and the top of The Magnificent Mile. Once off the bus, he let her go wild, following along as she ran in and out of stores featuring clothes from Paris, Milan and New York. She was a like a kid in a candy store with a nickel in her pocket, only she was a teenager, and she had his credit card at her disposal. It was a dangerous combination, one he was sure to regret when the monthly statement arrived, but right now he didn’t care. He was in heaven.

It helped that Five Minutes Elena had finally shown herself, probably about the time she came out of the fitting room at Nicole Miller on Oak Street in a black lace dress. He’d suspected it was her when she hadn’t scowled at him for the eyebrow waggle he’d given her, but he’d known for sure when she’d elbowed him in the ribs for a particularly lewd comment instead of giving him Not Around Me! Elena’s disapproving frown.

She laughed. She smiled. They had lunch at a bistro and traded bites of their sandwiches while she switched her things to her new Prada purse and yammered about how jealous Blondie would be. He rested his chin in his hand and smiled at her over his Long Island Iced Tea, drinking her in more than the alcohol. God, he’d missed her!

He grabbed a quick snack off a boutique’s shop girl while Elena was in the dressing room, taking the edge off his hunger, and he nearly came out of his skin when he looked out the front windows to see Stefan with Klaus and an unknown blonde walking by. The girl had to be Rebekah, and from the number of designer shopping bags she and Stefan were carrying, it looked like she was on a spree too. He waited until they were out of sight before breathing again and hurrying back to Elena’s side. He hid his fear and anxiety as she modeled the dresses she had chosen, but his answers to her requests for his opinion were distracted and she noticed.

He smoothed it over by feigning boredom and making a snarky comment about the shops needing a big screen TV to entertain the men while the women spent ungodly sums of money, and that was enough to throw her off the scent. He didn’t want to remind her of why they were there, or of what they were going to attempt to do tonight. It was enough that seeing his brother and the evil Original Duo brought him back to reality. He wanted to hold onto the fantasy for Elena just a little longer. He wanted their day to be perfect.

They left the boutique with another new dress for Elena, and he made the casual suggestion that they should drop their purchases off at the hotel because he was starting to resemble a Sherpa porter mounting an expedition to the top of Everest. Yes, he was a whipped pansy who still believed a man should carry a lady’s packages.

“Have you been there?” Elena asked suddenly after he’d made the comment.

“Where?”

She rolled her eyes. “To the top of Mount Everest?”

He shrugged. “Well… yeah. It’s easy when you’re super strong, super fast and don’t need to breathe.”

“What was it like?”

He pulled back the curtain of his memories and looked at the scene he had recorded from his trip in 1934. The panorama was breathtaking, but it had reminded him of his own fate: an endless horizon on a frigid, jagged landscape.

“Silent,” he answered. “The only sound was the wind. There was nothing alive up there. Not even me.”

He left her in the lobby while he dropped off the bags, and he found her by the little fountain with the cherub riding the dolphin fish when he got back. She turned to him and smiled, opening her hands in a questioning gesture. It nearly broke his heart all over again to see her with her eyes alight and full of welcome. Soon those eyes would be lost to him, one way or the other.

“Where to now, oh great Chicago guide?” she asked.

He wanted to avoid meeting up with Baby Bro, so he tried to figure out where he **_wouldn’t_** go. It was too bad that they’d already been to the zoo because that would have been perfect. With Rebekah burning holes in someone’s pockets (probably Stefan’s if he knew his brother’s penchant for doting,) they would probably stick to the shopping districts. Ergo, they needed to head in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in that direction that was familiar to him, and the lake, of course, limited their options.

There was one place, however, that had been a bustling tourist Mecca even back in 1922, especially in the summer when Mayor Thompson unveiled his "Pageants of Progress" exhibitions.

He grinned. “C’mon. Let’s go to the Navy Pier.”

It wasn’t called that in 1922. Back then it was called Municipal Pier, but it was still a place of excitement and entertainment. There were restaurants and theaters and amusements. It had its own streetcar that looped its length and breadth. It even had a hospital. He’s spent many an evening exploring the sights and sounds, flattering the lovely Flapper girls and letting them teach him a new dance called The Charleston. It wouldn’t become extremely popular until 1923, but the Bob-headed, beaded-dressed free spirits he preferred were well ahead of their times even then.

He offered that they should take the bus down to the pier, but Elena crinkled her nose at him and shook her head. She’d had enough of public transit, thankyouverymuch, so they headed for the Lakefront Trail and walked down. Even though it was late afternoon, it was still just about as perfect a day he could ever have asked for if he’d had to choose a last day with Elena Gilbert, and no one would find him complaining if there was a bit of a chill in the air. Elena didn’t feel it, of course, because she was still draped in his jacket, getting her scent all over it, and he realized that he would probably take it to bed with him for weeks afterward just to be near her smell again.

Walking always cleared his head, but there was still no clarity for him regarding what he should do. His beast had been quiet most of the day, locked securely away by his lovesick self as he indulged in his hopeless daydreams. But seeing his brother had awakened the darkness again, and now he could see his beast peering through the cell bars. He studiously ignored its baleful glare as he and Elena passed the Navy Pier fountains and approached the pier itself. He let Elena lead him through the Family Pavilion. There was shopping there and a food court, and even a Build-A-Bear workshop. Did she want a friend for the bear she had in her room? She laughed and shook her head, but she did grab a postcard, and he bought her an ice cream cone just to watch her lick it. They exited out the other side of the pavilion to the Navy Pier Park.

 _‘You can’t keep this up, you know,’_ his beast said.

_‘Watch me. I am the King of Avoidance.’_

_‘The sun will be going down soon. You’re going to have to decide.’_

_‘La la la! I am not listening to you! Look! Cotton candy and a Ferris wheel!’_ he replied, spying a booth with the spun confection near the huge amusement ride.

 _“I’m here to eat cotton candy and steal your girl…”_ he’d once taunted his brother. Oh, how that night had turned out so, so wrong.

“I was here for the World’s Fair in 1933. It was an amazing spectacle. There were lights and color and things no one had ever seen before!” he told her. “They had a sky ride that took people across the lagoon in the middle of the fair. It had two huge towers, one on either end, and you rode the car across. People lined up for hours to ride it. Everything, everywhere was new. There were all these innovations and advances in science and technology, and everyone was so desperate for **_something_** to be happy about since the Market had gone to shit in 1929.”

In that moment he was transported back in time, to a world of laughter and ragtime music and dancing girls, when life was simpler and easier, and the things that worried him now weren’t even shades in the darkest corner of his mind.

“There was a dance hall, and the band played ragtime all night long. Bootleggers smuggled in champagne and hard liquor, and the police turned a blind eye because they were on the take. I even saw Capone once, down here with one of his girls…” he said in a rush, waving his hand towards the Crystal Gardens.

He looked up. It was almost sunset, and he knew the view over the lake was magnificent from above. If they timed it right, they could watch the sun go down over the city from fourteen stories up.

“Hey, do you want to ride the Ferris wheel?” he asked excitedly, turning to her.

He was met with a scowl and a set of arms crossed over her chest. Five Minutes Elena had been replaced by Not Around Me! Elena in a matter of moments. She’d gone and Hyde-ed on him, and he hadn’t been ready for it.

“What are you doing? What is this?” she snapped, her eyes narrow and shooting daggers.

“What is what?” he blurted, flabbergasted. What the hell had he done to make her switch on him?

“This? The shopping? The sightseeing? The walk down memory lane? What the hell is all of this, Damon? Is this your twisted way of trying to show me that we could be good together?” she accused, but he saw her cast a guilty glance at the Ferris wheel, and it clicked.

He remembered his brother waxing smarmy poetic about carrying Elena to the top of a Ferris wheel during that stupid Mystic Falls carnival when Vampire Barbie was running amok. It was just his luck that the moment he really let his guard down and actually started **_feeling_** it, would be when she shut down on him.

_‘No, this is me giving you one last day of freedom and carefree joy before it all comes crashing down, because no matter what I choose to do tonight, your carefree days are over.’_

But he didn’t say that. Instead he fired back because he was hurt by her accusations and sick of this split personality teenager who wore Elena’s face.

“You are seriously killing my buzz here, Elena,” he growled, already hearing the gloating laughter of his beast enjoying his pain.

“Your buzz? I don’t care about your **_buzz_** , Damon! I care about Stefan! I’m not riding in a Ferris wheel with you or doing anything with you or going anywhere else with you unless it’s to go get Stefan! I love Stefan! I’m here to rescue Stefan! This has to stop, Damon! **_I don’t love you!_** I don’t **_want_** you! I’m **_never_** going to want you! You need to accept that and **_get over it!_** ”

She said it with such force, she spit on him, and her hands were clenched so tight he was sure she was leaving welts in her palms. The rage ripped through him, and he had to physically restrain himself from attacking her. He reined himself in, battling his beast back away from its cell door, until the fire burned out and was replaced by a cold, calculating fury.

 _‘Fine. If that’s how you want it, that’s what you’ll get.’_ “Oh, I’m over it, Elena. I am so over it,” he replied in a calm voice that shocked even him.

She raised her chin, her eyes defiant and willful. “I want to go back to the hotel,” she demanded.

_‘Oh yes, because you think you have the right to order me around.’_

For a moment he debated what he should do. Part of him wanted to fling her over his shoulder and carry her like an errant child, while still another part of him wanted to give her bus fare and tell her to find her own way back to The Drake. In the end, he split the difference. He grabbed her arm and, over her protests, which he very succinctly told her to cease, and she, amazingly, obeyed, frog marched her over to the taxi stand where he all but shoved her into the back seat of an idling cab.

“Take her to The Drake,” he ordered, tossing two twenties at the cabbie then slapping his palm on the roof of the car to tell him it was safe to pull away.

He counted to two hundred before his blood stopped boiling, and he began walking back. Luckily for him, but perhaps not so lucky for the man, a mugger attempted to rob him once he had left the heavily traveled portion of the lakeside trail. He killed the man in short order, relishing in the satisfying snap of his neck after he had taken his fill. Sex tasted good, but fear could taste better if he was in the right mood, and right now he was more monster than man. His beast howled, crowing victory, but he didn’t let it out.

“Get back in your cage,” he snarled, wiping his mouth of any spilled blood, then set about properly disposing of the body.

He was somewhat calmer when he entered the lobby of The Drake about ninety minutes later and found Miss Prim occupying a couch near the grand stairs. She stood up when she saw him, eyes disapproving and judgy, and stomped over.

“I don’t have a room key, and they wouldn’t let me in because I’m not listed on the reservation,” she snipped.

“Fancy that. Security that actually works. I knew I liked this place,” he replied before motioning with his head that she should follow him to the elevators.

She fell in behind him and stood as far away from him as possible until they got out on their floor. They didn’t speak as he slipped the key card in the slot and pushed open the door, waving her into the room ahead of him with a haughty flourish. She gave him a scathing look before stalking past him, her arms still crossed, but he just shrugged and smirked at her as he sauntered in. She dropped his jacket unceremoniously on one of the beds and promptly locked herself in the bathroom while he downed a blood bag and poured himself a drink, then he watched the last red and purple of sunset fade to inky blackness in thoughtful silence.

On the way back, he’d made his decision. He was going to go with Option Five. It was the option that best guaranteed their survival even if it meant giving Elena to Klaus. Today had been the last straw, and he just couldn’t do it anymore. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, nothing would ever be good enough or acceptable to her, and nothing Stefan ever did could make her turn from him. It was a hopeless, useless effort on his part, and it would only end up with him dying for a girl would wouldn’t love him or even treat him with a grain of consideration.

 _‘Now you see the truth. You are a pathetic loser who will always be second best,’_ his beast taunted. _‘Give the girl over and be done with her.’_

Yes. He would do it for now. He’d give Elena to Klaus. Klaus would have to keep her alive in order to make more hybrids. Stefan would be with her, and he knew from their brief meeting on the mountain that his brother was still in there. Stefan would keep Elena safe. In the meantime, he could go back to Mystic Falls, rally the troops and find a way to kill Klaus permanently dead. Once they knew that, they could mount a rescue and free Elena and Stefan in one go.

It seemed like the worst choice, but in the long run, it was the best. It bought them time and kept everyone alive, including him. They’d hate him, but they already hated him, so nothing new there, and if he had to be the bad guy to keep everyone alive, so be it. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t done before. With that in mind, he called Gloria. She answered on the fourth ring.

“This better not be who I think it is,” the witch challenged, and he could hear her turn on a spigot to make sure no hyper-sensitive ears could catch their conversation: clue #1 that Klaus at the very least, was there.

“Gloria! Miss me already?”

“I thought I told you to get out of this town.”

“Well, you know me, Gloria, I’m just no good at following orders.”

“So I’ve heard,” she answered drolly. “What do you want? And don’t tell me that you’re planning to come here.”

“Fine, I won’t tell you.”

“Damon…”

“Look, just answer me yes or no. Is my douche brother there?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Klaus?”

“Yes.”

“Blondie Klaus?”

There was a pause, then Gloria answered, “Yes.”

“Any way you can get rid of her?”

“Unlikely.”

“She and my brother getting reacquainted?”

“You could say that,” she replied guardedly.

Well, that would be interesting for sure, but… not his problem. Elena loved Stefan. It was always going to be Stefan. So if she wanted Stefan, she was going to have to deal with Rebekah. It was almost a shame that he wouldn’t be there for **_that_** catfight.

“Okay then. We’ll see you later.”

“Damon…” she said, her tone warning.

“Oops, is that someone calling for you? I think a customer wants a Sex on the Beach. Better get it for them. You’d hate to alienate your patrons with poor service.”

“Damon!”

“Bye bye,” he said and quickly hung up.

Elena must have been listening because she came out of the bathroom as soon as he was off the phone. He didn’t bother to look at her or even acknowledge her presence as he continued to stare out the window and sip his drink. He ignored her as she packed up her things, consolidating most of her purchases into one or two shopping totes and squeezing everything else into her gym bag. He tried not to wince when he thought of how much of his credit limit she’d burned through today.

 _‘I should consider it a last, parting gift. Here, Elena, you get to keep the Prada, but you lose your freedom. I wonder if you will appreciate all that you had after you’ve lost it. We never really know what we have until it’s gone,’_ he thought.

He heard her zip up the bag and sit on the bed. A flick of his eyes showed her reflection in the glass, and it looked like she was getting ready to make a long speech.

“We need to talk,” she said.

 _‘This is going to be good,’_ he mused to himself, but said nothing as he kept looking out the window and sipping his bourbon.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate all that you’ve done for me. I do. But I think I’ve been giving you mixed signals, and that isn’t fair of me,” she went on, all business-like. She must have been preparing the little speech for a while. He wondered if she wrote it down somewhere. “There is absolutely no chance for you with me. You have to understand that. I love Stefan. It’s always going to be Stefan, and if… if you can’t accept that, I can’t have you in my life. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

He waited a good long time before he finally turned to face her, his eyes distant and cold. She met his icy gaze without fear, something he admired even if it was colossally naïve of her.

“Gloria said she can’t get rid of Rebekah for us, so if all goes south with our brilliant little plan tonight you might not have to worry about me at all,” he stated, then he moved to gather up his own things and repack the cooler with the remaining blood bags. When he was done, he collected his toiletries from the second bathroom and stowed them away in his black bag. 

“Make sure you’ve got all your stuff,” he told her, draping the bag’s strap over one shoulder. “We’re not likely to be coming back here tonight. We’re taking the Camaro to Gloria’s. I’m hoping that won’t prove to be a mistake. Let’s go.”

He waited for her to pick up her totes and gym bag, watching her with dispassionate eyes as he moved to put his leather jacket back on. It reeked of Elena’s scent, and he almost made a spectacle of himself by burying his face in the lining, but he stopped himself before he could get started. She kept giving him furtive glances, however, as if she was wondering when he was going to respond to her little spew of nonsense, and he almost laughed at her. Seriously, did she expect him to grace that pile of bullshit with an answer? If she did, she’d be waiting a very long time.

Once they were ready, he led the way back down to the lobby and Bell Services where he requested that the valet bring his car around. They got into the Camaro, and he put the top down in anticipation of having to jump into the driver’s seat for a quick getaway. The short drive was silent, but heavy with tension, and he gripped the steering wheel as tightly as he dared. Part of him knew she’d backed him into a corner, and now he had no choice but to follow the path he had chosen, but that didn’t make him wish he could choose otherwise. No matter what happened now, Elena would never trust him or rely on him ever again.

But maybe that would just make it easier. They’d be free of each other, and that might be a blessing in disguise.

“I won’t say I’m sorry,” she said succinctly as he was parking the car in the alley behind the rear entrance of Gloria’s bar.

“Neither will I,” he answered. But he would. He’d apologize to her over and over forever… in his nightmares.

He turned off the engine, and they both got out of the car. The plain steel door that marked the rear entrance of the bar was in front of them, and he took a step towards it, wondering how best to commit this ultimate betrayal.

 _‘You can’t do this,’_ his beast said. ‘ _You don’t have the balls.’_

He gritted his teeth and shook his head. _‘Just watch me. One way or the other, this ends tonight.’_

“So… do I just wait out here?” she asked him, her arms wrapped around her midsection as if she was cold. He almost offered her his jacket again before he came to his senses.

“You want me to go in and send my brother out while I distract Klaus and Rebekah?” he replied.

She nodded, her jaw set and her eyes determined. “Yeah, I think that’s the best plan. I’ll vervain him, and then we can get him in the car and take him home.”

“Just so you know, you’ll have about five minutes before they rip my heart out, so you’ll have to act fast,” he stated.

There it was out there. There was nearly a 100-percent chance he would die if they executed her brilliant plan. If Klaus didn’t kill him, Rebekah certainly would, probably after torturing him for a while if her reputation was any indicator.

“Okay. I get it. Just get him out here, and I’ll do the rest,” she answered with false bravery.

“So you’re okay with me getting my heart ripped out then,” he said, facing her, forcing her to look at him before she sent him to his death.

 

She rolled her eyes and huffed. “Don’t be overly dramatic Damon,” she scolded.

Overly dramatic? Really? “Understood. Loud and clear. Me getting my heart ripped out is okay with you as long as you get your boyfriend back. It doesn’t matter if I die.”

She shook her head in denial. “That’s not what I meant…”

“Oh, that’s exactly what I think you meant, **_Elena_**. I’m just a means to an end for you. I always have been. Your leashed vampire that you take out on outings to do your dirty work, then chain outside when you’re all done with him.”

He stoked the anger and pain roiling inside him because it was the only way he was going to be able to make himself do this. But he had to. If he didn’t, they would both die. 

“Damon…”

He ignored her protests. He didn’t want to hear it. She’d used and abused him all summer, putting his life at risk, leading him on, and giving him false hope. He’d had enough. He was Damon **_fucking_** Salvatore, badass vampire and no one’s lovesick bitch. Not anymore. He was going to be free of this ungrateful child once and for all.

“I get that you don’t love me. I get that. But I never thought you’d be willing to sacrifice me for Stefan. But hey, that works out for you. If I martyr myself in your honor, then it’ll be safe for you to feel something for me. Because we both know the only time you let yourself feel anything for me is either when you’re drunk or I’m about to die. And you know I’d die for you because I willingly took an arrow in the back for you. Poor lovesick Damon. Will you shed fake tears over my desiccated body and give me a sob-filled eulogy?”

“You’re not being fair!” she shouted, but he could tell his barbs were hitting home.

“Fair? What part of any of this is fair? Me taking the bite for Blondie? My brother becoming Klaus’s bitch to save me? You running hot and cold all summer and using me? Me letting you? Nothing about this mess is fair! Guess what, Elena. **_Life’s not fair!_** ”

His blood was full of rage and fire, and he was almost vamping out. He was angry enough now. He was ready. He could do this, but just to be sure, he ripped a scab off another wound to feed his pain and give him the final push he needed.

“Not even Katherine was twisted enough to screw with my head like this. She openly admitted to me that she purposefully set me up to die if I tried to use the dagger on Elijah. At least she was honest about not giving a shit if I was dead as long as she got what she wanted,” he seethed, letting himself feel the anguish of knowing the love of his life, the woman he had ached over for 145 years, who had admitted to loving his brother and not him, had knowingly and willingly sent him to die.

That was it. He snapped, releasing all of his reservations over what he was about to do, and let his beast goad him on. He reached out and grabbed Elena’s arm, forcibly pulling her with him towards the back door.

“Damon? Damon, what are you doing?” she demanded, struggling. It was a futile, useless gesture.

“I don’t feel like dying for you tonight. I’m not even sure you’re worth living for anymore. You’re not the Elena I know. I don’t know you.”

With that, he dragged her into the bar.

 


	11. Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

 

“What are you doing?” Elena demanded, her voice just on the edge of panic as he pulled her through the rear door of the bar.

He knew that the place would be full of patrons at this time of the night, so he threw the fire alarm as he passed it, making the shrill bell shriek loudly through the building. He heard the concerned and worried shouts from the customers, and Gloria’s calm voice telling everyone that it was most likely a false alarm, but to please exit the bar in an orderly fashion just to be safe. Her tone told him that she knew there was no fire, but that she agreed with getting any collateral damage out of the building.

“Damon! Damon, stop!” Elena ordered, digging her nails into his arm as he dragged her down the short hallway to the main tap room.

A second later, a wide-eyed Stefan blurred into view in front of them. He put on his game face and sneered.

“Hello, Brother. We’re baaack,” he sing-songed.

He wished he had a camera to capture the gaping fish expression on Stefan’s face when he realized that Elena was there with him.

“What are you…?”

He ignored his brother’s stunned stammering and pushed past him, yanking Elena along. She tried to plant her feet, but her new leather-soled pumps just slid on the linoleum. He kept going until they had cleared the hall and entered the bar, crossing onto the hardwood floor. The scene was chaos. Gloria was by the main exit, directing people out, patrons were running for the door in a panic, and Klaus was there in the middle of the room, trying to make sense of what was happening. At some point, someone turned off the alarm, which was good because he was certain that his ears were about to start bleeding. Oddly, there was no sign of Rebekah, and he considered that a small blessing.

“Klaus!” he called, catching the Original’s attention.

“No no no no no…” he heard Stefan saying, and he smiled. Baby Bro always was a quick study.

The were-vamp turned to look at him, and he watched the emotions play across Klaus’s face as the other vampire processed what he was seeing. His whole body went cold when he saw Klaus smile, and his resolve faltered a little.

 _‘I can’t do this! Oh, God! I can’t do this!’_ his heart cried, but the calculating part of his mind answered, _‘You have to! It’s the only way to save her! Besides, it’s already too late.’_

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?” Klaus said, predatory eyes on Elena as he stalked towards them. “I do believe I see a doppelganger who is supposed to be dead.”

With a quick release and push, he shoved Elena at Stefan, knowing his brother was behind them and trusting him to behave true to form. Saint Stefan would catch her, and attempt to be her savior while Damon threw himself into the pits of hell. He was right. Stefan grabbed her and held her close while she clung to her perfect love and glared at him. Her face was red with betrayal, her eyes full of hate and unshed tears. He’d seen that expression so many times, he was surprised that it still had the power to hurt him.

“Yes, well, reports of her death have been greatly exaggerated,” he answered.

Klaus grinned, his eyes alight with a fire that scared Damon down to his very soul, but he still shoved himself into the Original’s path when he moved towards Stefan and Elena.

“You can’t kill her!” he blurted, planting his feet and praying it was enough to slow the were-vamp down long enough to get him to listen.

“Watch me,” Klaus growled, vamping out.

“You need her blood to make more hybrids!” he shouted desperately.

That made Klaus pause even as he heard both Elena and Stefan gasp. In an instant, the were-vamp was in his face, eyes still red and mouth flashing fangs.

“What? Explain yourself,” Klaus demanded.

He ignored the disappointed look on Gloria’s face and the little shake of her head. If they both survived the next five minutes, he hoped to get the chance to make it up to her.

“The curse was a paradox. To break it, you had to kill the doppelganger, but to make more hybrids, you need her blood to complete their transition. It was a failsafe built into the spell by the original witch who cast it. Even if you managed to break the curse, you’d still be forever alone,” he explained.

Klaus looked at Gloria. “Is this true?”

The witch put a hand on her hip and frowned. “It’s true. Her blood is the key to stabilizing the hybrids’ transitions.”

The Original scowled, his vamp face fading. “I’ll deal with you later,” he warned before he turned to Stefan who was now trying to shield Elena. “Did you know this?”

Damon watched Stefan swallow nervously before nodding. Elena gasped and tried to step away from him, but his brother kept his arm around her. The twice betrayed look on her face was almost too much for him to bear.

“You knew?” she accused, glaring at both of them, but staring mostly at Stefan in disbelief.

In a way it hurt that she didn’t look at him in the same manner, as if his betraying her was something she had expected. It cut him to the quick and made him want to stake himself right then and there for being such a colossal disappointment to her. She would never know how hard it was to make the difficult decisions he’d had to make to save her, or how making this one was killing him even if he knew he had no choice.

Stefan gave her one of his signature tortured looks, and Damon had to roll his eyes before he burst into tears. So far, however, things were actually going rather well, or at least, no one was dead yet. Klaus looked at him, a gleeful glint in his eyes as if he knew Damon was dying inside, and he was enjoying every moment of seeing him squirm.

“And the crazy, impulsive brother is the only one with the balls enough to do the right thing,” Klaus commented. “You knew once I found out she was still alive, I would have slaughtered my way through everyone and everything until I found her.”

“Well, lucky for you, I deliver,” he replied, wrapping himself up in his familiar snark and bravado.

“And thus saving your own skin, although I had already promised your brother that I wouldn’t hurt you. In light of this current betrayal, however…” Klaus cast a glance at Stefan. “I think I would have invalidated our agreement.”

“See? Now you don’t have to. I know how you feel about keeping promises. Your brother, Elijah, he was good at that, too,” he taunted, getting into it. He had to hype himself up because otherwise he was going to do something stupid like try to stop Klaus while Stefan escaped with Elena.

“Don’t push your luck,” Klaus replied.

“You know me, I redefine cutting edge,” he said.

“Still in love with your brother’s girl, I see. Pity all it’s brought you is pain. Does she realize what you’ve done?”

“Do they ever?” he shot back, earning him a knowing smile from Klaus.

For once, the two of them understood each other completely, and he relaxed a little. Klaus might keep Elena his prisoner, but he wouldn’t hurt her. This would all work out according to plan, albeit it would be a **_long_** term plan. As long as Klaus had his doppelganger to make his hybrids, he would leave Damon and the Mystic Falls Scooby gang alone, and they would be free to figure out a way to send the were-vamp to his final death. If he could just force himself to walk out the door and leave her there, he could get started on that.

“I’ll go get her stuff,” he said, spinning on one heel and blurring out the back door with vamp-speed. He was back in less than a minute with all of Elena’s bags, which he dropped in Stefan’s general direction.

“What are you doing?” Elena’s furious voice demanded, and her indignant rage actually helped him.

He faced her, his eyes full of fire and accusations. “What am I **_doing?_** ” he answered, getting into her face even as Stefan pulled her away. “I’m giving you what you want, Elena. I’m giving you Stefan! Did you not tell me three hours ago that all you want is Stefan? That it will **_always_** be Stefan. Well, here he is. Here’s Stefan! Hooray for True Love!”

The tears began pooling in her eyes as she shook her head at him, and Stefan drew her closer and glared. He always had to play the hero, the poor, suffering vampire with the crazy brother. Well, fuck him. Fuck them all.

“I don’t believe you. I knew you were cruel and vindictive, but… ” his brother began.

He cut off the Salvatore lecture before it could get started. “Cruel and vindictive? Are you kidding me? Did you not get the memo? Apparently, even though you ran off with Klaus, and left a string of body parts up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and compelled my girlfriend to kill herself, you’re still **_better_** than me. And even though I did everything she asked me to, and kept her safe all summer, and followed every dead-end lead to hunt down your sorry Ripper ass, and was willing to **_die_** for her, I’m **_still_** not good enough!” he seethed. “Well, guess what! **_I give up!_** I admit defeat! I’m not you! I’ll **_never_** be you! And all she wants is **_you_**. So here I am, giving her you.”

He made a gesture of offering with both palms up, cocking his head and pulling his lips back into an arrogant grin.

“Enjoy,” he stated, looking around at all the unhappy faces glaring at him. It only made him angrier.

“Why isn’t everyone happy?” he snapped. “Everyone gets what they want!” He pointed at each of them as he spoke. “You get to make more hybrids. You get your girl back. You get Stefan, your Epic Love.” He pointed to himself with both hands. “And **_I_** get to be free of all this bullshit! It’s a win-win-win-win! We should all be jumping for fucking **_joy!_** ”

He spread his arms wide and stepped back, a manic smile on his lips. God knew, he felt like he was coming out of his skin with the civil war going on inside his head, but he had to keep it together just a little bit longer. Elena broke free of Stefan’s grip and rushed him. He could have easily blurred away, but he let her slap him across the face. It was the least he could do even if it stung like a bitch.

“You son of a bitch! You knew all this time! You bastard!”

“Ah ah ah! I knew very well who my father was. Your precious Stefan killed him,” he countered, leering at her.

“Stefan, get a hold of her,” Klaus ordered, and Damon watched his brother obey without question, grabbing Elena by the arms and pulling her away.

_‘Hmm, compelled. Interesting.’_

Elena was having none of it. She kicked and struggled against Stefan’s grasp on her, but his brother held her fast. The tears were coming now; big fat drops that stained her already rage-red face.

“I hate you! You’re a monster!” she screamed.

He tried not to feel kicked in the balls, but he did. He gritted his teeth and snarled at her.

“You should know. I am what you made me,” he replied harshly.

Turning to Klaus, he offered his hand. “No hard feelings, yes? You know how brothers can be.”

“Oh, I do. Indeed, I do,” the Original replied, then he struck out and grabbed Damon by the throat, lifting him off his feet and letting him dangle. “And it’s not that I don’t appreciate your bravery, or stupidity as the case may be, in coming here tonight, but even with your very generous gift, I have a bit of trouble trusting you. So I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a few questions.”

 _‘I’m on vervain. I’m on vervain. I’m on vervain,’_ he repeated over and over to remind himself that he wasn’t compellable, but damn, he’d better make it look good.

As it turned out, he didn’t need to because at that moment, Blondie Klaus entered the bar. She took two seconds to survey the scene with confusion, then an incoherent fury came across her face, and she vamped out.

“Why is that doppelganger bitch wearing my necklace!” she demanded.

Several things happened all at once and at vampire speed. First Klaus dropped him as Rebekah rushed for Elena. Then Stefan shoved Elena out of the way and took the impact, getting slammed bodily into several tables. Rebekah screamed in stymied rage as her brother grabbed her and pulled her off Stefan.

Damon took the opportunity to blur forward, grab Gloria and carry her out of the rear exit of the bar before she even had a chance to voice a protest. He knew Klaus would probably remember that Gloria knew about Elena, or force Stefan to tell him how she knew. Either way, it was likely that the Original would kill the witch, and Damon would prevent that if he could.

He hoisted Gloria over the car door and tossed her into the passenger seat, very glad that he’d thought to leave the top down for precisely that reason. He was already behind the wheel and peeling out of the alley as fast as the Camaro could spin tires before Gloria realized what he’d done.

“You are one crazy ass vampire!” she scolded, righting herself to sit properly in the seat.

“No argument there,” he agreed, trying to gun the car through an intersection before the light turned red. He had to put as many miles as he could between him and Klaus as soon as possible.

“I could fry your brain, you know,” she threatened.

“Please do it after I’ve parked the car. She’s my baby, and she doesn’t deserve to get wrapped around a telephone pole because blood’s hemorrhaging out of my eyeballs.”

He figured he had about five minutes to get to the Dan Ryan Expressway if he wanted to make a clean getaway. He didn’t know how much time it would take for Klaus to get his sister under control, but he knew it wouldn’t be long.

“You can slow down. I’ve cast a masking spell on the car. Klaus won’t be able to track us,” she told him, and he believed her.

“Thanks,” he said, easing up on the gas as he reached over and pressed the button to put up the top. The wind in his ears was starting to give him a bigger headache than he already had.

“I figure I owed you one. I don’t know if Klaus could’ve bested me, but it would have been close, and if the three of them had come at me at once, I’m not sure I would’ve made it,” Gloria admitted a bit uncomfortably.

“Three?”

“I’m sure you’ve figured out that Klaus is compelling Stefan’s obedience.”

“Yeah, I noticed that,” he answered in a clipped voice that belied his discomfort with that fact.

“That was a gutsy thing you did, giving Klaus that girl. You’re taking a big risk.”

He glanced over to see her looking knowingly at him, a wry smile on her lips, and it made him ache. Gloria was one of the few people who actually saw **_him_** and not the façade he showed the world.

“Yes, well, you said it yourself. He needs her blood to make more of his barking vampires. Once he found out that Elena hadn’t died, he would’ve stopped at nothing to get her. Elena would’ve surrendered herself to Klaus the moment he started threatening to kill people. Hell, she’s such a damn martyr that she would’ve handed herself over the moment someone broke a nail,” he complained, scowling. “At least this way, no one got killed, and we can all go on with our merry, little lives.”

The witch’s smile widened proving that he wasn’t fooling her in the least. “You plan on gettin’ her back soon?”

He shook his head. “Not until I know how to kill an Original were-vamp permanently dead.”

“I may be able to help with that. I’ve been looking into it ever since we heard that the curse had been broken. We witches would be very interested in killing the first vampire-werewolf hybrid. That ain’t something that’s supposed to exist.”

“You come up with anything?” he asked hopefully.

She shook her head sadly. “Not yet, but I’m still looking. If I do, you’ll be one of the first to know.”

“I’ll make sure you have my number in case I get rid of this phone. Probably will actually,” he promised.

“Okay,” she agreed, then motioned ahead. “You can drop me off near Washington Park.”

He nodded that he understood and fell silent, hoping she would take the hint that he really didn’t want to talk. The quiet didn’t last long.

“You going to be okay?” she asked him.

He pursed his lips and gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “Just peachy.”

“You know… not too many people can love someone enough to do what you just did, and certainly not too many vampires.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Love? I don’t love her. She’s a conniving, using, manipulative bitch who’s worse than Katherine ever was. I hate her. She deserves everything she gets, including my douche brother. He’s who she wanted anyway, and if Klaus wants the two of them to be cooperative, he’ll keep them both happy.”

“You ain’t foolin’ no one, Damon. You love that girl. You love her enough to let her hate you, and to ruin any chance you had with her, if it meant you could keep her safe. I don’t see that kinda love too often.”

He growled, hoping she would drop it, and, thankfully, she did, but her quick assessment of the truth only made him hurt more. Every mile he put between him and Elena, knowing he had left her there in the hands of someone who had hurt her, taken Stefan, killed her and killed her loved ones, was agony. Gloria was right to question whether he would be okay. Right now he didn’t know because he was mostly operating on autopilot, and he was sure it was a form of shock.

He exited off the Dan Ryan and turned on to Garfield Blvd towards Washington Park. They were stopped at a red light when Gloria reached over and placed her hand on his arm.

“There’s a train station a block from the park. Drop me off there,” she told him.

“Okay. You gonna be safe?”

She smiled. “Don’t you worry about me none, honey. My juju is strong, and they don’t have me cornered. I’m more worried about you, and how you’re going to handle all of this.”

He scoffed and started the car forward as the light turned green. “No need. I’ll be fine. Better than fine. I’m free as a bird. Freer even.”

“Uh huh. Sure you are, and I’m Ella Fitzgerald.”

“You’re forgetting I’ve heard you sing, and I know you have a good voice,” he countered. “You could give Ella a run for her money.”

Gloria laughed and shook her head. “Sweet talker. I’m sure you say that to all the girls.”

He gave her one of his sexy smiles. “Only the ones who can make my brain explode just by looking at me.”

He turned off Garfield while she was still chuckling, and pulled up to the curb in front of the train station parking lot, bringing the Camaro to a stop.

“The masking spell will last until you’re well out of the city, but I suspect Klaus will know where you’re headed if he’s inclined to follow you,” she told him.

“Nah, I don’t think he will. He has what he wants, and my guess is he’ll have his hands full with Blondie Klaus, my bro and Elena. I’m low priority.”

“Don’t underestimate him, Damon. He knows you hate him and that you’ll try to find a way to kill him if you can,” she warned.

He turned serious. “I know. You call me if you find anything and watch your back.”

“I will. Thank you for what you did tonight.”

“No problem. Couldn’t have my favorite witch becoming were-vamp bait.”

She met his gaze with a look that made him feel naked and not in a sexy way, and he recoiled a little because he got the impression that she was seeing his soul.

“You’re a better man than your brother, Damon. You always were,” she said, then she got out of the car and headed for the train station before he had a chance to respond.

If that was so, then why did he feel worse than he ever had in his life?

 


	12. Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

 

Elena was shaking, trying to stay calm as she watched Stefan pacing back and forth in a bedroom in the mansion Klaus had secured by killing the owners. After Klaus’s sister had tried to attack her for her necklace – which turned out to have originally belonged to Rebekah in the first place, and Damon had pulled a Katherine and run for the hills, abandoning her with Stefan everything had been insane. Klaus had practically ripped Rebekah off her, then he’d ordered Stefan to put her in a car, and they’d all headed for… wherever this was. To be honest, she had no idea where they were other than in a swanky neighborhood somewhere near Chicago. Stefan had dragged her up the curved stairs of the huge house and had locked her inside the large bedroom with an ensuite bathroom the moment they got there, and she hadn’t been allowed to leave since. She had no idea where Klaus or the horrid Rebekah were, but right now they were the least of her problems.

Stefan seemed completely freaked out, and he had been since Damon had dragged her into Gloria’s bar and shoved her at him. At first, she hadn’t known what was happening, but then she’d realized that Damon was **_giving_** her to Klaus. That had been enough of a shock, but when she’d found out that he’d known that it was her blood that was the key to Klaus being able to make hybrids, and that **_Stefan_** had known too, it had completely thrown her for a loop. She was still processing the ramifications of that revelation, but none of them were any good.

When had Damon found out about her blood being the key? Had Gloria told him yesterday when he went to see her? Did that mean that he had known about it when he was telling her about Stefan, Klaus and Rebekah? If so, why had he left that part out? Why didn’t he say, “Oh, by the way, the reason Klaus can’t make hybrids is because he needs your blood”? Had he been planning to give her to Klaus all along? Or had he made one of his crazy, impulsive, self-destructive choices that he did when he was hurt and lashing out?

And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything to be hurt and lash out about, right? She’d only been a complete bitch to him earlier tonight, and last night when she’d asked him if the name he was using had belonged to a man he had killed and stolen his identity. Where the hell had that come from? She knew she was PMSing, but she usually wasn’t such a schizophrenic bitch.

All she knew was that she’d spent hours reading about a Stefan she’d never met, a Stefan who had ripped people apart and left bodies in pieces all over the place. A Stefan who did depraved things to his victims and delighted in their pain. It was a Stefan she didn’t know, a Stefan she had assumed was like Damon, except… except Damon **_didn’t do_** those kinds of things.

Damon didn’t have black outs or rip his victims apart or leave piles of bodies in his wake. He didn’t torture his victims and laugh at their pain. Stefan wrote in his diary that Damon was as depraved as he, but it wasn’t true. No matter how evil Damon had been, he’d never committed the gruesome, macabre crimes that Stefan had.

How did she know that? Because Stefan had told her so months ago during a tear-filled, heartfelt purging one night in his bedroom, back when she was giving him sips of her blood to get him “used” to it. Oh, how naïve she had been. But that night, he’d admitted that Damon had never lost control, how he’d always kept a leash on his vampire nature enough not to go off the deep end the way Stefan did. Yes, he’d been impulsive and murderous, but never to the scale and depth of carnage Stefan had gone to.

Part of her had to admit that she’d been angry with herself, and with Stefan for keeping so may things from her, and she’d taken it out on Damon the way she’d done in the past. It wasn’t fair to him, but he just seemed to always take it. That was their dynamic. She’d lay it all on him, write about it in her diary at night and realize how awful she’d been, and then she’d try to make it up to him.

It was how they worked, and it was part of their “understanding.” She could beat up on him because he almost seemed to beg for it, and she’d let loose, knowing it was safe to do so. With Stefan, she had to keep it bottled up because he didn’t like it when she got angry, but with Damon she could let him have it with both barrels, and he would give as good as he got. Recently the forgiveness part had been slower in coming, and the hurt look wasn’t fading from his eyes as quickly. Usually a smile or a touch from her would make it go away, but now he wasn’t buying it so readily, and this trip… this trip he’d been throwing her shit back at her pretty much the whole time.

Yesterday when she’d been waiting for him to get back to the hotel, she’d been writing in her diary and realizing that she really had crossed some lines. Accusing him of stealing a dead man’s identity and credit card really was the lowest she’d gone with him to date, and there had been no excuse for it other than she’d been channeling her inner Caroline. She’d been freaked out about the fancy hotel, and feeling self-conscious and scummy from the long trip. It wasn’t that it was The Drake that was so bad, but that it was **_Damon_** who had taken her there and not Stefan. She should have been there in the historic hotel with her boyfriend, and not sharing a room with his brother, even if it was a “family” room with two beds and two baths. And Damon, being Damon, had completely ignored her discomfort, smirked at her, and flaunted a Palladium card after compelling just about every hotel employee they’d encountered. It had just set her off, and she’d snapped.

She realized that she should never have come with him. They’d been getting too close as of late, too familiar with each other, and she had to watch her behavior around him so he wouldn’t get any ideas. She was also still furious about what he’d done at the Founder’s party, and then killing Ric and attacking Bill Forbes, and fighting with Caroline, and then all that stuff Caroline had said to her the following day. Caroline had said Damon had gotten under Elena’s skin, and Elena had felt the need to purge him out. The last thing she should have done was go with him on a road trip to Chicago.

When it was just her and Damon, one-on-one, they clicked. They liked the same music, the same types of food (pickles notwithstanding), and the same way to travel. He brought out the fun-loving Elena that she used to be, and she brought out the gentler, more human side of him. On their own, without anyone to get in the way, they got along very well, but then she would remember all the horrible things he’d done, and she’d remember her **_boyfriend_** , Stefan, and she’d get so mad at herself for letting her guard down. And of course, it was all **_Damon’s_** fault for confusing her, and he was doing it on purpose. He was obviously trying to steal her from Stefan because of his misguided **_feelings_** for her, pushing all her buttons and making her question her relationship, and that absolved her of any and all guilt over her actions.

Really, it did.

_‘You think?’_ a little voice in her mind said with some considerable sarcasm.

She vehemently disagreed. Damon was absolutely doing it on purpose because he wanted her to forget Stefan. He’d all but told her so on the night they got back from Tennessee, when he was in her bedroom, cupping her face and telling her that he wanted her to remember the things she felt while Stefan was gone. He loved to get her off guard and shake her up, reminding her that Stefan wasn’t there and he was.

Like today at the Ferris wheel. How **_dare_** he ask her if she wanted to ride the Ferris wheel? Didn’t he know that she and Stefan had gone on the Ferris wheel at the Mystic Falls carnival? You know, the night Vicki Donovan attacked several people because **_Damon_** **_had turned her into a vampire?_** How could he be so heartless and cruel as to ask her to betray Stefan’s memory by going on that ride with him? Did he have no shame?

_‘Y’know, he was pretty lost down Memory Lane somewhere in the 20’s. It probably didn’t even occur to him,’_ a rational part of her brain said.

_‘Shut up! He did it on purpose!’_ she insisted.

_‘Why? So you could scream at him and tell him you don’t love him, don’t want him, and will always choose Stefan? After he dropped how many thousands of dollars on you when you went crazy with his credit card?’_

The truth chastised her, and she looked down at her new dress and shoes. _‘I should give it all back…’_

_‘Good luck doing that since he just left you here.’_

A spasm ran through her, a visceral reaction to a reality that she knew she would find terrifying if she actually took the time to examine it. Damon had **_left_** her there. He’d dragged her into Gloria’s bar and threw her at Stefan. **_Why?_** They were supposed to be **_rescuing_** Stefan and getting him away from Klaus. She wasn’t supposed to be joining the Were-Vamp Entourage. The only plus was that at least she was with Stefan, although looking at him, she wasn’t convinced that could be considered a plus. Stefan obviously didn’t think so.

She wished Stefan would stop his nervous pacing because she wanted to get to the planning the rescue part of the night. The part where they figured out how to get away from Klaus, and his whacko sister, and run back to Mystic Falls where they could gather everyone and come up with a plan to fight Klaus once he came after her. The fact that Klaus needed her blood to make more hybrids really did throw a wrench into everything, and now that the truth was out, she knew Klaus would never let her get away. He’d come for her, and he absolutely **_would_** kill anyone who got in his way just like he’d admitted when Damon “delivered” her.

They needed to figure out what they were going to do, and fast, because if she went back home, everyone there would be in danger. There’d be no way they would have enough time to come up with a plan before Klaus came after her. The only way to escape him would be to run away, but then he’d just go to Mystic Falls and start killing her loved ones until she surrendered herself.

It struck her that Damon had probably already figured all of that out. Since he’d known about her blood and the part it played in making hybrids, since yesterday, he’d probably run through almost every angle of every option, and tried to figure out which one was the best – or at least the least horrible in a host of terrible choices. He would have known that running back to Mystic Falls would be a death sentence for Jeremy, Bonnie, Caroline, Alaric, Matt… Anyone who had any connection to her (and probably anyone who didn’t) would be fair game. She’d learned from experience that vampires had no qualms choosing someone to kill if it meant that they would get their way. Hell, her own birth mother had threatened her friends and family just to prove a point. Klaus wouldn’t blink at killing the entire population of Mystic Falls if it meant she’d give herself over to him, and Damon would have seen the carnage coming a mile away.

So maybe that was why he didn’t say anything. He’d already looked at all the angles and had come to the same crappy conclusions she had. She knew from experience that if Damon was faced with a hard choice, he’d keep it to himself and just go ahead with it solo rather than tell others about his plans. And if she knew him, which she did, he probably would have wanted her to run away with him. She could see him trying to make a case for running off together; to just get in the car and go as far and as fast as they could, to run from Klaus the way Katherine had run for 500 years.

Of course, that would have meant sacrificing all the people left behind in Mystic Falls who would have had to face Klaus’s wrath, and Damon must have known that she would never go for that. Which was also probably why he hadn’t said anything.

But if that were so, then all he would have had to do was rip off her necklace and compel her to do what he wanted. It would have been nothing for him to get close enough to her to grab it and then catch her eye. She had seen how quickly and effectively he compelled people; getting her under his spell would have been child’s play. So why didn’t he do it?

_‘Because he knows how you would feel if you ever found out that you’d been compelled,’_ she realized.

Damon had had many opportunities to compel her in the past, but he’d never had. He’d once told her that he didn’t do it because he wanted what was between them to be real. It was an unspoken truth between them, and, no matter what else he had done to her, he’d never crossed that line. He respected that absolute truth that he knew would mark a point of no return.

But if she was right about what he’d been going through all of last night and today, then a great deal of his behavior made a whole lot of sense. In hindsight, she could read all the signs that told her he was struggling with something, but trying not to let on about it, and she mentally kicked herself for missing them. Damon was the king of redirection and distraction. He would send you off on a tangent to get you out of the way while he did the heavy lifting. It was how he protected the ones he cared about.

So what had made him decide that handing her over to Klaus was the best option? She had to calm down and look at it objectively. Damon **_loved_** her. She **_knew_** that. He wouldn’t have chosen this if he hadn’t felt it was the best thing to do. No matter how angry he was at her, no matter how much she’d hurt him or he’d hurt her, he would always put her first. He’d proven that over and over again. Even when he’d forced his blood down her throat before the sacrifice, he had done it in a desperate attempt to keep her from dying permanently. There had to be a reason why he’d done it, she just needed to figure it out, and then maybe she could understand **_why_** he had abandoned her with an obviously off-the-rails Stefan and two one thousand-year old vampires, one of which was a Were-Vamp hybrid.

_‘Okay, work it through. What are the pros and cons?’_ she reasoned, taking a deep breath while watching Stefan stalk around the bedroom. She was keeping one wary eye on him, but he was completely ignoring her.

Giving her over to Klaus reunited her with Stefan. Stefan loved her and would protect her. Giving her over to Klaus protected the people in Mystic Falls because there would be no reason for Klaus to come after her, and Klaus couldn’t kill her because he needed her blood to make more hybrids. Giving her over to Klaus gave Damon time to go back to Mystic Falls and rally everyone to find a way to kill Klaus and free her and Stefan. From that point of view, giving her to Klaus was the option that killed the fewest people and kept her safe because she would be with Stefan.

The greatest downside to that was doing it meant he had to betray her and hand her over to their enemy, the vampire who had pretty much destroyed her life, killed her aunt, taken her boyfriend and turned him into a raging, homicidal psychopath who ripped people apart. It was a horrible, shitty thing to do, and she wouldn’t forgive Damon any time soon. He’d also compiled his sins by not talking to her about it and telling her the truth. He knew how much she hated having her choices taken away from her, but he’d ignored that and had gone ahead and made the decision to give her to Klaus without any input from her. If he’d just **_talked_** to her and explained what was happening, they could have made the decision together. But no, he had to go all caveman on her, **_again_** , and make the choice without her.

The next time she saw him, she was going to let him have it… after they had killed Klaus, of course, and rescued Stefan, and Stefan was back to himself again, which he was definitely not right now. In fact, it was painfully obvious that Stefan was out of his mind. Klaus had compelled him, and he was completely under Klaus’s control. Not something she cared for very much, and it had frightened her to see Stefan obey Klaus without question whenever he was given an order. That would make securing his help in escaping much more difficult. He’d also taken her phone at Klaus’s command and destroyed it, so she had no way of calling anyone else for help unless she could steal Stefan’s or gain access to a public phone since she doubted the house had a landline.

She still had the vervain darts that she’d shoved into a holster strapped to her inner thigh – a gift from Damon of course, who had made many lewd comments about the holster’s “proper” placement, but without his help to carry Stefan once he’d been knocked out, they were useless to her.

_‘Don’t think about that lying, betraying, rat bastard right now,’_ she seethed, getting angry at being left out of the loop and abandoned without his back up all over again. _‘You need to focus on Stefan right now. Damon was right about one thing. You are here to save Stefan. Stefan loves you. You’ll get through this, and you’ll get that son of a bitch later. You’ll stake him yourself in a really private place or let Bonnie make his brain explode.’_

Setting her anger aside, she turned to Stefan and tried to figure out what to do next. He was manic, very much like he’d been that night in her bedroom when he’d admitted to being on human blood. He was pacing, muttering to himself, and clenching and unclenching his fists. She watched him go to a sidebar, pull out a liter of liquor and drink a huge swig right from the bottle.

“Stefan,” she tried, going to his side and reaching for him. “Stefan, you have to calm down.”

It was the first thing she’d said to him since they’d arrived at the mansion, and he looked at her, wild-eyed, as he lowered the bottle and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. His expression was one of confusion, as if he’d forgotten she was there, and her speaking had reminded him of her presence. He glanced down at her offered hand and frowned, stepping away from her as his face turned dark and angry.

“What did you do?” he demanded, his eyes accusing and fierce. “Tell me what you did!”

She shook her head, confused. “What are you talking about? Tell you what?”

“What did you do to Damon!” he yelled.

“Do to Damon?” she repeated, appalled. Those words were the last thing she was expecting to hear from him, and she was stunned. “I didn’t do anything to Damon! I swear! I was faithful to you, Stefan. I didn’t do anything with him. I promise. I love you, Stefan. I’d never betray you like that.”

Where she thought her assurances of her fidelity would comfort him, he only seemed to become more agitated, and he turned away from her, pacing again and shaking his head.

“No no no. What happened?” he muttered. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened! Stefan, I already told you I didn’t do anything with Damon. Well, okay, I did kiss him, but I thought he was dying. It was a good-bye kiss! And it was just the one!” she insisted, grasping at his sleeve.

“You gave him a pity kiss?” he asked, whirling to face her, his eyes spearing her through her heart.

His tone took her back, and she shook her head. “Pity kiss? N-no. It wasn’t a pity kiss.”

“So it meant something then. Katherine was right.” He looked distracted, his eyes darting back and forth.

“Katherine? **_No!_** No, Katherine just walked in on us at the end, when Damon was dying. Don’t believe anything she told you. You know how much she lies and manipulates people. The kiss meant nothing, I swear!” she said.

“Elena, I know there was something going on between the two of you. I know you have feelings for him,” Stefan replied.

“No! Never! I even told him tonight that I didn’t love him and would never want him,” she swore to him, desperate to make him understand that she hadn’t been unfaithful.

“You did what? Why? Why would you do that?” he demanded.

Stefan looked as if she had just dropped a bomb on him, and she didn’t know why he was so upset with her. Wasn’t he happy that she hadn’t taken up with Damon? There were many girls who would have felt abandoned by Stefan if they had been in her place, and they probably would have gone for the other brother. But she wasn’t just anyone, and he wasn’t just any old boyfriend. He was **_Stefan_** , and they were meant to be together forever.

“Because it’s true! I don’t love him. I love **_you!_** What was I supposed to do?”

“You were supposed to **_forget_** about me!” he yelled vehemently, clenching his fists.

“Wh- **_what?_** ” she gasped, shocked.

Stefan’s face contorted with pain, and he dug his hands in his hair.

“I left you with Damon! He was **_feeling_** again! You were bringing back his humanity! For the first time in 145 years, my brother felt something for someone other than himself. He was learning how to **_love_** again!” he explained in a desperate voice.

“Stefan…” she began, flabbergasted. Was he saying that he had expected her to just switch brothers? Did he not know her at all to believe that she would do to them what her doppelganger had done? This couldn’t be Stefan. Klaus had to have compelled him to leave her and give her to Damon. There was no way Stefan would tell her to forget him and turn to his brother, not in a million years.

 

“Stefan, I’m sorry, but I can’t believe you would think I would do that. You and Damon aren’t interchangeable. I’m not like that. I’m not Katherine.”

She tried to say it calmly, but in truth his words, and what they implied, really pissed her off.

“My brother, he was a good man,” Stefan said suddenly, his voice ragged and breathless. “Before Katherine destroyed us, he was the best man I knew. He felt deeply, and he believed in his convictions. His moral compass was skewed, but he was always kind, and he saw the good in people. He protected me from my father. He loved me, and I loved him. He was my **_best friend._** ”

“I know that Stefan,” she assured him. “Well… I have a hard time believing that Damon was ever a **_good_** man…”

“Don’t you talk about him like that!” Stefan snapped. “He always put me first! He’d take the blame for my indiscretions and let our father flay his back raw so I wouldn’t have to suffer! He was the most selfless, unselfish person I’d ever known until Katherine came between us. We were as close as two brothers could ever be. Katherine took that from us. She took my brother away from me. She took me from Damon. She played us and used us and threw us away when she was done. She let me believe she was dead, and let Damon believe she was trapped in the tomb for 145 years. She destroyed my brother’s heart for her own amusement, and I destroyed his soul when I forced him to become a vampire.”

She shook her head in disagreement. “You didn’t destroy his soul, Stefan. You aren’t responsible for the decisions he made or the things he did after he turned. Damon’s told me more than once that no one is responsible for him but himself.”

“But I am! Don’t you see? I’m the one who did this to him! I’m the one who did this to both of us. **_It’s all my fault!_** ”

“It isn’t your fault. Stefan, you can’t keep blaming yourself for the mistakes you’ve made in the past. You have to forgive yourself and move on. You have to promise to do better. You have to get control over yourself like Lexi made you,” she said.

“Lexi’s **_dead!_** ”

“I know. Damon **_killed_** her,” she reminded, sneering.

“The Council was getting too close. They knew there were vampires in Mystic Falls. Damon sacrificed Lexi to buy our safety,” Stefan countered.

“Will you listen to yourself! You just rationalized your brother killing your best and oldest friend!” she cried, trying to make him see reason.

“Why not? It was something I would do! I **_did_** do it! Did he tell you that Andie was the fourth girlfriend of his that I’ve killed?” he shot back.

“What? N-no… he didn’t tell me that,” she admitted, taking a step away from him.

“The last time we were here in Chicago in 1922, Damon was seeing this dancer named Estelle. Do you know what I did to her?”

“Stefan…” she tried, not liking the look in his eyes at all.

“I compelled her away from him. I made her leave the apartment where I didn’t have an invitation, and I brought her to a house where **_he_** didn’t have an invitation, then I put her in the living room in full view of the front windows. When Damon came to rescue her, all he could do was watch as I compelled her not to move, then I proceeded to gut her and eat her organs. She screamed until I ripped out her heart and sucked it dry while it was still beating.”

Elena recoiled, feeling sick because she knew he was telling the truth. She had read similar gruesome scenes in his diary. Still, to hear him describe the tortures he put his victims through from his own lips was terrifying.

_‘Damon! How could you leave me here with him, you bastard! Couldn’t you see, with all your **planning** without me that Klaus had compelled your brother right off the deep end?’_

The obvious answer was because she’d told him to, because she had done everything she possibly could have to ensure that the older Salvatore would gleefully hand her over to his younger brother, and he’d helped her do it by pushing every button he could in order to make her go after him. It was almost as if he’d wanted her to rage at him, to push him away and hurt him in the worst ways possible.

_‘Maybe he did. Maybe he needed to get **that** angry and hurt in order to go through with it.’_ It was an interesting thought if it were true.

“Did he tell you what I did to Andie?” Stefan asked, his eyes bright with sadistic glee.

“You made her jump off a gangway,” she answered.

“While I held him back so he couldn’t save her. Her head popped like a tomato on the concrete. There was blood and gray matter all over the place.”

“Stop it. Stop it, Stefan, this isn’t you,” she told him, trying to make him see reason.

“But it is me, Elena! It is **_me_**. This is **_who I am_**.”

“No,” she insisted. “No, this is what Klaus made you. He’s compelling you, controlling you. He’s making you like this.”

“I was always like this! I was the Ripper of Monterey well before I ever met Klaus, and when we did meet, he was a kindred soul! Damon wouldn’t run with me. He wouldn’t commit the depravities I would. Even at his worst, he never went as low as I did. But Klaus would, and Rebekah… We were lovers you know, here in 1922. Rebekah gave whole new meaning to the word **_kinky_**. You think you offer me anything in bed? Baby, you’re an infant compared to her. She took me to places I’d never even dreamed of.”

She slapped him across the face before she could stop herself, then shrank back, horrified by the look in his eyes as he advanced on her.

“Stefan,” she pleaded.

He bared his teeth, but backed off. She knew Klaus had compelled him not to hurt her.

“You always were a suicidal idiot, and we were lovesick fools. We loved you too much to let you die. Damon almost solved the problem by having the guts to force his blood into you, but we both had to fuck it up by giving you your **_choice_**. So John comes up with the transfer spell, a life for a life. **_His._** He died for you so you wouldn’t wake up undead, but in doing so you’re now Klaus’s hybrid-making blood bag. How’s that for irony Miss I Won’t Let Anyone Die for Me? I guess that didn’t include your own biological father,” he taunted.

“I didn’t know the spell called for a life for a life! If I’d known that…” she cried, mortified that he’d brought that up and starting to feel the tears coming on. How could he hurt her like that? Didn’t he know how horrible she felt about Jenna and John’s deaths?

“You what? Would have let yourself become a vampire?” he asked, cutting her off.

She stopped short, shaking her head and clenching her fists at her sides. “I never wanted anyone to die for me,” she insisted.

“That obviously didn’t include my brother because he was out there on that mountain in Tennessee surrounded by werewolves that could kill him with one bite,” he countered.

“He wasn’t supposed to be there! I told Ric, and Ric was the one who called Damon! That wasn’t my fault!”

“It’s never your fault, Elena, but people around you keep risking themselves or ending up dead! Did you honestly think that the people who loved you were going to let you out there without protection?”

“I was trying to save you! You called me! I know you did! Liz traced the call! I know it was you!” she cried.

**_“I don’t need saving! I don’t want to be saved!”_** he yelled.

She stopped short and stared at him, the tears beginning to roll down her face. “Stefan…” she choked.

“I left you with Damon. I knew Damon would protect you. He loved you. For so long, he was nothing but hate, and rage, and resentment, but you… you were bringing him back. His… loving you was making him become the man he was. I saw it. I saw my brother again, and it was because of you,” he said in a broken voice.

“It… it doesn’t work that way, Stefan. I can’t… I couldn’t turn to him, and I doubt he would have let me even if I had. He felt obligated to you because you saved him. He wouldn’t have stopped looking either,” she told him, choosing her words carefully.

Stefan shook his head. “He was always so stubborn when he set his mind to something. He wouldn’t let go of it no matter what. The two of you are evenly matched that way. Neither of you know when to give up on a lost cause.”

“You’re not a lost cause,” she argued, sniffling.

“I am. I’m lost to you. I’ve done horrible things. I’ve killed dozens of people and liked it. Klaus has compelled me to obey him, and I have to do whatever he says. He’s in my head, taunting me, torturing me all the time! And now there is Rebekah, and she wants me to belong to her. We were lovers here in 1922, but Klaus made me forget!”

“You have to find a way to break the compulsion. It can be done. Bill Forbes, Caroline’s dad, he knows how to do it. We need to get out of here and get back to Mystic Falls. He can help you,” she told him.

Stefan disagreed. “I can’t. If we try to escape, we’ll get caught, and who knows what Klaus will do. I can’t protect you. If he orders me to hurt you, I’ll have no choice but to do it.”

She stood resolute and shook her head. “You’d never hurt me.”

“I wouldn’t want to, but if he compelled me, I’d do what he said, and it wouldn’t matter how much I love you. Don’t you see? I’m no good for you when I am like this, and this time it’s 100-times worse than the last time I drank human blood.”

She went for comforting, coming in close. If she could get him in the right spot, she could vervain him and then…

_‘And then what? Damon’s gone. How far could you drag him before you were discovered? Do you even know where you are? How to get to the highway? Anything?’_

In that moment of helplessness, she hated Damon, but she hated herself just as much.

“It’ll be okay. We’ll get Bill Forbes to help you. Help me, Stefan. If we stay here, Klaus will use my blood to make more hybrids. We have to get out of here. Help me, please,” she begged. 

She could see the indecision cross his face, and for a moment she was sure she had him, but then he shook his head.

“It’s too late, Elena. You shouldn’t have come here. You should have stayed in Mystic Falls. Now I don’t know what to do. I was trusting Damon to keep you safe. And I was trusting **_you_** to save **_him_** so he could save **_me._** ”

“ ** _I’ll_** save you, Stefan. You don’t need Damon to save you. **_I’ll_** do it,” she answered, reaching for him.

He looked at her with 145 years of anguish bleeding out of his eyes and shook his head in hopeless grief.

“You can’t.”

She would have argued, to insist that she could save him, that she had saved him in the past, but at that moment the door to the bedroom opened. It gave her a little thrill to see Stefan immediately put himself between her and whoever was entering the room, but her heart sank when she saw that it was Klaus. She swallowed hard and shrank back behind Stefan as the Were-Vamp rubbed his hands together and looked entirely too pleased for her tastes.

“Well, well, well. It looks like we’re all going to have a little chat about betrayals, conniving witches, doppelganger blood, and the future,” Klaus said, smiling.

She reached for Stefan’s hand and was only somewhat comforted when his fingers closed over hers.

 


	13. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

Damon drove, both hands gripping the wheel as if his life depended on it, and in many ways, it did. The further and further he got from Elena, the more his heart screamed in anguish and denial. A hundred times his hands moved to turn the car around, to go back, to throw himself on Klaus's mercy and beg him to let Elena and his brother go. A hundred times he had to lock his elbows and keep the wheel steady so the Camaro would stay on course. His mind was reeling, railing, howling a keening wail that he kept in only because his jaw was clenched shut. He would not cry, he would not gnash his teeth, he would not go back. He would keep going, keep driving, even though he knew he would never, ever, outrun the memory of Elena's shattered face when she realized what he was doing.

It was like two rabid dogs fighting to the death in his head, and him, a helpless observer who was just trying to survive. His beast was roaring to be released, promising the oblivion of flipping the switch. His conscience was calling him every name he'd ever called himself, trying to shame him into going back. Coward. Evil. Liar. Betrayer.  ** _Monster_**. He choked on a sob and gritted his teeth, feeling his fangs coming down as he bordered on insanity. His vision was going red.

A horn blared, bringing him back to reality, and he realized that he was drifting out of his lane into the SUV next to him. He turned a snarling face to the soccer mom who was glaring at him, showing his fangs and blood-red eyes, and took a perverse pleasure in seeing her horror and fear. She slammed on her brakes, and he veered into her lane, narrowly missing her, and stomped on the gas. The Camaro's engine revved high, and he felt the power of the car as the tires gripped the road, and they sped down the highway. Eighty. Ninety. One hundred. One hundred and ten. The world was a blur, but he could still see Elena's pain and tears.

It got to the point where he locked his beast and his Jiminy Cricket into separate Isolation cells and tuned them both out. He concentrated on the purr of the engine and the flashes of white as the dashes in the middle of the road flew by. It was meditative and calming. His breathing evened out, and his face returned to normal, as he found a small center of stillness inside him. It was the same place he reached for every time he found himself in this position, when he knew he would have to make a choice that he  ** _had_**  to make, but that he would regret and have to live with for the rest of eternity. He'd been there many times before, and he knew it well. His heart was heavy with the burdens it had to carry, but he carried them because he knew he was the only one who could.

He drove in silence, allowing the highway to stretch out into an endless darkness. The Camaro's headlights illuminated only part of the asphalt, leaving the way ahead shrouded in black, which was fine because it suited his mood. Without Elena in the car, he made the trip in under eight hours, and it was approaching dawn in Mystic Falls when he got back. By the time he turned off the interstate, he felt empty and hollow, like a black hole had opened up inside his chest and sucked all of him into it. He took back roads to the Boarding House, not wanting anyone to see his car and alert people to his return. There would be questions and recriminations enough once he told the others what he had done, and he didn't want to face them when he was like this. He needed to get control, he needed to have a plan on  ** _how_**  to tell them  ** _why_**  what he had done was the  ** _best_**  choice. He had to make them understand that it had kept them and Elena alive, and bought them the time they needed to figure out what to do.

And he needed to make peace with what he had done, or at least get to a point where he could function without feeling like he'd ripped his own heart out.

' _Well, that's what you've done, isn't it?'_  his beast said.  _'Set me free and I'll make the pain go away.'_

He growled and slammed the door shut on the monster as he closed the Camaro's door more carefully. He'd parked the car in the garage so no one would see it in the drive and closed the retractable door. In keeping with the "nobody's home" theme, he left all the lights off and moved silently through the house, his ears carefully trained to make sure he was alone. When he was certain he was the only living or undead creature in the house, he went for his liquor cabinet and took three bottles out. He didn't bother with a glass as he took the cap off one and drank right from the neck. The bourbon burned all the way down, but the pain gave him something else to focus on as he made his way to his bedroom.

He placed the bottles of liquor on his bedside table and took off his jacket, laying it gently on the mattress, then he stripped off the rest of his clothes and took the hottest shower his skin could stand, scrubbing and scrubbing himself until he was red and raw, and cursing his vampire healing that he couldn't make the pain last longer. He only got out of the shower when he ran out of hot water and made his way to his bedside where the bourbon was waiting. He picked up the open bottle and took another deep drink.

' _You are the lowest of the low,'_  his conscience hissed _. 'Here you are getting drunk while the girl you love is Klaus's prisoner.'_

' _Yup, that's me,'_  he agreed, drinking more. He wasn't nearly drunk enough. He could still see her face, still hear her call his name. She'd called it, hadn't she? As he carried Gloria out of the bar, he could swear he'd heard Elena scream his name. He could have imagined it. It could have been wishful thinking on the part of his frayed mind, a conjured delusion that had the love of his life crying for him as he abandoned her. Maybe he would believe it to be true instead of imagined so he could flagellate himself with it over and over again. He'd taken many beatings in his long life, most of which he'd deserved, but no one beat him better than he beat himself.

He was naked, still dripping wet, in his bedroom, swigging booze from the bottle and trying to wrestle the pain into something manageable. Of all the horrible, evil, twisted things he had done, leaving Elena with Klaus had to be the worst. Even though he knew it was the right choice. Even though he knew it had saved them all, it was still the single, most despicable, dishonorable deed he had ever committed.

' _You shouldn't have done it. She'll never forgive you,'_  his Jiminy said.

' _She doesn't have to forgive me. She just needs to live. And who asked you? I thought I'd shoved you in Solitary,'_  he griped, shoving his conscience away again.

He finished off the first bottle and opened the second. Getting through the next 24 hours was going to require copious amounts of alcohol, he just knew it. He walked back to his bathroom and grabbed a towel for his still dripping hair, and he roughly rubbed his scalp with it to sop up the bulk of the wetness. He debated on whether or not to bother with clothes and decided against them. There was no one there, he was completely alone and hoping it would stay that way.

His eyes fell on his jacket. He'd left it on the bed for a reason, but he wasn't sure he was drunk enough for what came next. He wanted to start a fire because the room was chilly, but the smoke and the scent of burning wood would give his presence away, so he opted instead to slump down on the mattress and proceed to drink himself senseless. Somewhere between the end of the second bottle and the first half of the third, he lay down on the bed and reached for his jacket. He shoved his face into it and breathed deep, searching for her scent and finding it. It surrounded him, all comfort and warmth and home except now it reeked of his betrayal.

He wanted to cry, but he didn't have the right. He did this. He had committed this heinous crime, and he didn't deserve the solace of tears. Choking back a sob, he wrenched his nose away from the leather and buried it into his pillows. If he sniffed deeply enough, he could still smell Elena and Rose in the cotton batting. He loved this bed, this room, his sanctuary in a crazy world that expected so much of him and rejected him when he did what only he could do.

He was so tired. So tired of having to make the hard choices. So tired of having to be the bad guy who got blamed for everything, but yet everyone turned to when someone had to do unpleasant things. So tired of the blood on his hands that everyone else put there, but crucified him for having. He was so tired of being alone, of being second best, of being left behind. Unloved, unwanted, rejected and hated.

' _You need to let it go. You were happier before you came here. Just let me go and be free,'_  his beast whispered.

Free. He wanted so much to be free, but he would settle for the brief escape of sleep. He clutched his jacket close to his chest, pressed his face to the pillows, and let the darkness take him.

xxxxxxx

When he woke, sunlight was coming in the narrow window near the fireplace, and he figured that he'd slept about four hours. It was a benefit of his vampiric existence that he did not suffer from hangovers the way mere mortals did, but he did feel as if an entire field of cotton had grown in his mouth overnight. Getting out of bed, he ignored how he had awakened with his body curled around his leather jacket, holding it like a teddy bear or a lifeline, and headed for the bathroom. Another shower was in order, and a hefty dose of mouthwash.

It wasn't until he'd showered, brushed his teeth, and got dressed, that he finally felt calm and centered enough to face the rest of what he needed to do. He knew he had to gather the Scooby Gang and tell them what had happened in Chicago, but he had time since all of them, including History Teacher/Vampire Hunter, were at the high school and wouldn't be available for a meeting of the Super Friends until much later in the afternoon. That worked for him because he needed some time to gather some things together. He was in diabolical planning mode now, and he always worked best when his brain was engaged.

First things first, he went down to the library and began to search for a particular first edition of  _Madame Bovary_  written in the original French. He wondered what Elena would think if she knew that most of the volumes in the library had come from him; books and series sent to the Boarding House by "Uncle" Damon over the decades. He figured that she assumed Stefan was the bookworm of the family, and oh how surprised she would be to find out that 1st Edition copy of Walt Whitman's  _Leaves of Grass_  was his and not perfect Stefan's.

He growled, angry at himself for getting sentimental. Kids these days didn't read books. They had iPads and Kindles and smart phones. They read ebooks and blogs on the internet. If things kept going the way they were, no one would remember what a paper book was, and libraries like the one in the Boarding House would become obsolete.

' _Until the next apocalypse when humanity succeeds in blowing itself back into the Stone Age_   _because they can't stop killing each other.'_

Seriously, Elena and her friends thought vampires were evil because they killed people. Didn't she know that more humans died every day of starvation than all the people vampires used as snacks in a year? Let's face it, there weren't too many of them and most of them tended to be selective in their choice of victims, and of those, he figured only about 30-percent of them actually killed. Klaus and his douche brother were the exceptions, of course, but they were the aberrations and not the norm. He was telling the truth when he told Elena that leaving a trail of body parts upset the locals, and in today's modern age vampires needed to be all the more careful. Unless they wanted to live in some shit hole Third World country with no government and no indoor plumbing.

He found the book he was looking for – it was right where it was supposed to be because  ** _he_**  knew how to properly organize a library, and pulled it out. He handled the book as carefully as he would a fragile glass sculpture and gently opened it to the part where he had tucked an envelope nearly eighty years old into its pages. He took out the envelope and returned the book to its spot on the shelf, frowning at the layer of dust and vowing to come back and give the library a proper cleaning when he had time.

He took the envelope over to a desk and sat down before he very carefully pulled out the folded, yellowing letter within. Written in ink that had long ago turned sepia colored, he reread the neat script that was Emily Bennett's daughter's handwriting. The date on the letter was September of 1934 and she was in her late 70's by that time. She was writing to warn him about a situation brewing in Europe. The letter had found him in Spain where he had gone after he had made his trip to the top of Mount Everest. He'd traveled through Asia to the Middle East, and finally the Mediterranean Sea where he settled in Torre del Mar, Spain. The letter had literally just appeared in his bedroom one night, which is how he knew how Bonnie had managed to give Elena a heads up the night he and Stefan had rescued her from Rose and Trevor – and killed Elijah (the first time,) and it had detailed unrest among the witching community. War was coming, bloody and drawn out, and Europe would be its epicenter. She knew how he felt about war. They'd had long discussions about it in 1916 when he'd helped her keep her brother from joining World War I. She knew of his nightmares and experiences during the American Civil War, and now she was telling him that an even  ** _bigger_**  war was coming, and he needed to get out of Europe as soon as possible.

He'd known that. June 1934 had brought The Night of Long Knives when Hitler's SS in Germany had assassinated hundreds of SA Brownshirts who threatened his regime, and word had just come that Adolf had been voted in as Fuhrer. Damon had recognized the man for the psychopath he was, and he'd even heard rumors of new internment camps being set up to hold dissidents and undesirables. No, he hadn't needed a letter from a witch he'd looked after since she was seven years old to tell him it was time to relocate. Civil War was brewing in Spain, too, and would probably erupt in bloodshed within the next couple of years.

Still, it had been nice of her to give him a heads up, but that wasn't why he'd hidden and now retrieved the letter. In it she had also given him a recipe for a potion that would make a vampire temporarily immune to magic. Like vervain, it needed to be constantly imbibed to preserve the effects, but unlike vervain, the cure was worse than the disease in that it negated the effects of his daylight ring. Luckily, it wore off about two hours after consumption, so if he just drank it with enough time for it to be out of his system by sunrise, he would be fine. Since Bitchy Witchy's spell of choice was Vampire Migraine, the potion would offer him some protection from her attack, which he knew would come the moment she found out he'd left Elena with Klaus.

' _Note to self. Do not convene the Justice League until after sunset,'_  he mused, refamiliarizing himself with the ingredients. Some of them would be hard to find on such short notice, but the others would be easy enough. It would take most of the morning to brew, though, because he remembered that it had to steep for a few hours. He refolded the letter into its envelope and rehid it, this time tucking it into a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica under "P" for potion. Wasn't he clever?

Patting his pockets, he searched for his keys and found his phone. It had been turned off since last night, but now he turned it on and he was not surprised to see that he had twelve missed calls and seven new voicemails. Eleven of the twelve were from a number that had to be Stefan, but the other was from Gloria. Curious, he hit the button to listen to his messages.

"What have you done?" Stefan's frantic voice accused from the recording. "You son of a bitch! Get back here and take her with you!" Click.

"I knew you were a depraved monster, but how could you do this! You bastard! You get back here and take her with you right now!" Click.

"If you don't come get her, you'll find her body in pieces strewn on the Boarding House front lawn!" Click.

"Okay. You've proved your point. Whatever twisted, depraved point you were trying to prove in your psychotic head, you've proved it. You win. Please come get her now." Click.

"Damon… Klaus has compelled me to obey him. I can't protect her. Please. You don't know what you've done. She isn't safe with me. Damon, please come back." Click.

"Klaus is moving us soon. I don't know where to. Please Damon, if you love her, please forgive her. Whatever she did to you, please forgive her. Please come get her. Damon, please, you can't leave her like this. Please…" Click.

The last one did him in. He dropped to his knees and put his forehead to the floor, his whole body shuddering with the war that erupted inside him. Every fiber of his being compelled him to run to his car and go back for her, even if it meant his certain death if he tried to rescue her from Klaus. His mind was screaming so loud that he almost missed Gloria's message. It was short and simple.

"I have news. Call me."

He clung to those six words like a lifeline. She had news. Maybe it was a way to kill Klaus. Maybe he could go back to Chicago and start fixing this mess. He picked himself up off the floor, sniffed back his tears, and called her back.

"About time," Gloria's voice said when she picked up after the 4th ring.

"I was busy," he replied, going for cocky bastard.

"More like drinking yourself senseless would be my guess. Where are you?"

"I'm back in Virginia."

"So you ran away, too. I remember that being your M.O."

"Do you have news for me, Gloria, or are you just going to continue to remind me how much I suck?" he snapped.

There was a pause, then Gloria spoke more gently, "You did the right thing. I know it doesn't seem like it right now, but it was. Klaus has what he wants, and you have time to plot against him."

"Not too much time," he corrected. "He has to know that I won't let it go. He's going to expect me to come after him."

"Yes, but he'll assume that he's too strong, and that you'll have no chance against him. You can use that arrogance to your advantage."

"You gonna give me that chance?" he asked, trying to bring her back on point.

"Maybe. I was able to get the necklace forged by the Original witch who cast the curse on Klaus."

That surprised him considering how Rebekah had freaked out when she saw Elena wearing it. "How'd you do that? Last time I saw it, Blondie Klaus was ripping it off Elena's neck."

"Believe it or not, it was under one of the broken tables that were smashed in the fight. You owe me for damages by the way."

"I'll send you a check. So what happened?" he demanded, getting a little impatient. Did he need to gas up and get out of Dodge or not?

"I haven't cast the spell yet. I need to do some preparation first."

He rolled his eyes even though he knew she couldn't see him. "Better work fast. It looked like Barbie Klaus wanted her necklace back real bad. She's going to come looking for it the moment she realizes it's missing."

"I know, but word is Klaus is leaving Chicago and taking your brother and the doppelganger with him."

He winced as he remembered the pleading message from Stefan and felt his heart spasm. "Any idea where they're headed?"

"No."

"Didn't think so." No matter. He'd just follow the bodies like last time.

"And Damon… I wouldn't go after him until you're ready. You'll have one chance. Make sure you don't waste it."

"I won't," he promised.

"Have you spoken to anyone yet?"

"Not yet. I'm getting some things together now. I was actually about to brew a batch of Emily's No Mojo Juice. I expect to need protection from a Vampire Migraine spell in the near future."

"That potion will deactivate your daylight charm."

"I know."

"I'll send you a Protection Against Magic talisman. It will do the same thing, but allow you to still go out in daylight."

"Much obliged." He was actually rather surprised and taken aback by her offer, and it spoke volumes on how she felt about him.

"I owe you. This is part of my debt, and to be honest, we witches aren't too happy that the curse was broken. It's in the best interests of the Balance, that Klaus, and whatever hybrids he creates, are destroyed."

"And you got stuck with me to do it. Aren't you lucky?" he taunted sarcastically.

"You've made a fine Champion in the past. You did it for Emily's kids, and you protected the Bennett line. Others may have forgotten that, but I haven't, and neither has Emily. She sends her regrets, by the way."

He growled as he remembered Emily's betrayal, but stifled it. "She broke her promise, but I think I know why. It's okay."

Gloria fell silent for another moment before continuing. "She'll help you where she can. Look for the talisman in your car. If I find out anything else, I'll contact you."

"Thanks."

"Good luck. You're going to need it," she said, then hung up.

"Well, that was a plethora of useful information," he complained to himself as he put his phone back in his pocket.

At least he wouldn't have to brew the anti-magic potion. The stuff stank to high Heaven and tasted worse. And speaking of taste… he was a bit hungry, so he headed down to the basement for a couple of bags of blood for breakfast. He should be well stocked if he remembered correctly – unless Blondie had raided his freezer while he was gone as she was sometimes wont to do.

He found the stock as he'd left it, chose two bags of O-neg, and prepared to take his meal up to the kitchen for reheating since he rather hated drinking cold, bagged blood. He was just turning around when his Spidey Sense went off the Richter Scale, and he vamped out to face the threat he just knew was behind him.

Standing there, brandishing her cell phone and a look that could kill, was Blondie.

"Care to explain this text from Elena saying you left her in Chicago with Klaus?" she asked, menace in every word.

 


	14. Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen

She hit him full force, slamming him into the rack of shelves behind him, and he lost his grip on the blood bags. One splattered all over the floor, but the other got smashed against the junk on the shelves, popped, and spewed cold blood all over him.

" ** _What did you do?!"_**  she screamed, grabbing him by his shirt, her red eyes blazing, fangs extended.

Words and explanations were on his lips, but he realized it was too late. Obviously, Elena had managed to gain access to a cell phone, and she had texted for help. In doing so, she had completely ruined any chance he had of staying in control of the situation, and guiding it towards a common goal of rescuing her and Stefan and killing Klaus. Once again, an eighteen-year-old girl had been able to FUBAR his plans, and she'd even managed to do it from over 600 miles away. Just his luck. He vamped out and pushed back, but Blondie held her ground.

"Answer me, you bastard, or I'll stake you right now!" she threatened, and he saw her reach for a stake in her jacket.

That was it. He realized that she had no intention of listening to him. None of them ever did. He was the evil one, the hated one. The one they expected to do all the dirty work then go back to his cave like good, little monster. Nothing he did for the good would ever make a bit of difference with any of them, and he was done taking their shit.

The last time they'd fought, Caroline had bested him, partly because she was angrier and partly because some part of him didn't want to hurt her. Now he threw off those reservations and went after her full-bore, because there was no way he was going to allow himself to lose to a blonde vampire Barbie doll less than three years old. He knew he wouldn't kill her, but he was going to rain down a world of hurt on her, and she would  ** _never_**  forget the beating he gave her –  ** _ever_**.

He knocked the stake out of her hands, then head-butted her and followed with numerous blows that sent her flying into the stone wall. Her face showed her shock at the ferocity of his attack, but he didn't let up. He grabbed her and threw her down the hall, slamming her into the rocks hard enough to break her ribs, then he snapped both of her arms so she couldn't use them. She screamed in pain, and the sound made him pause for only a moment before he broke her spine low on her body to paralyze her legs. She gasped and stared wide-eyed at him as he fisted her jacket collar in both hands and lifted her broken, dangling body to his face. With her limbs out of commission until they healed, she was helpless, and the look on her face told him she knew it.

"When Jules and her dogs had you prisoner, who came for you? When Klaus was going to use you as his sacrifice, who was the one who set you free? When your were-mutt boyfriend couldn't keep control of himself, who sent you off and took the bite that was meant for you? Any debt I owed you, I have paid in spades! I owe you  ** _nothing!_** " he seethed.

She let out a strangled cry when he knocked her against the wall to make sure she was paying attention, and if she was surprised by his brutality, she shouldn't have been because he was only doing what everyone had always accused him of doing whether he did it or not.

"I wasn't going to kill your father! I didn't kill your mother because Liz is my  ** _friend!_**  I am not the monster you paint me to be. Every time I have had to make a hard choice, it's because one of you birdbrains fucked up! Well I am  ** _done_**  being your dog!" he told her.

"Yes! I left Elena with Klaus! And if you had come to me and asked me what was going on, I would have told you that I did it to keep all of us alive! I would have told you that I found out the reason Klaus can't make hybrids is because he needs Elena's blood for the newborns to make the transition. I would have told you that Stefan  ** _knew_**  this, and that it was just a matter of time before he told Klaus, because my douche brother has been compelled to be Klaus's little  ** _bitch!_**  And the moment he found out that little tidbit, he would have come after us for her, and we'd all be dead because we still don't know  ** _how to kill_**  an Original!"

Her hips twitched so he snapped her spine again, ignoring her whimper and the tears leaking out of her eyes. He wasn't done, and she was damn well going to listen to him for once.

"Leaving Elena with Klaus was the hardest thing I have ever had to do, and she will hate me forever for it, but it was the only option that kept us all alive. As always, I did what I had to do because we had no plan and no way of defeating Klaus. He would have come here and killed each and every one of us until he got Elena, and you and I both know it, so spare me the stupid arguments. My only comfort is knowing that she's with Stefan, and he'll protect her as much as he can so long as Klaus doesn't compel him otherwise, which I doubt he will if he really does need her blood to make more hybrids. And before you ask, if I  ** _could_**  have gotten Elena to run away with me, I  ** _would_**  have, but she wouldn't leave this pathetic, little town and you useless wastes of space."

"Damon…" she tried, sobbing, her hands spasming as the bones in her arms healed. It had to hurt like a bitch.

"I was planning to get everyone together once you finished your daily experiment in public education, and tell all of you this so we could start forming a plan, but as usual Little Miss Martyr had to go and fuck up everything. I am guessing either she or you told Witchy?"

She nodded. "Bonnie and I got the same text," she confirmed.

"Is she on her way here?" he asked, wondering if Gloria had magicked the No Mojo Talisman into his car yet.

"She had a midterm this morning so I texted her that I would come here to see if you were back. Damon…"

"Shut up, I'm thinking," he snapped. "If she texted you, chances are she texted Ric and Junior Gilbert too. Which means I get to waste time defending myself against more pathetic attempts to kill me, instead of us working on a way to kill Klaus and save Elena and my brother. Wonderful."

"Damon. Damon, please…"

"No," he spat. "You don't get to ask me for anything. I have had a really bad night, and this day has sucked balls so far, so I am not in the mood. You came here with the intent to attack me and try to kill me without giving me any opportunity to explain myself. You've used up all your lifelines, Blondie, and I'm not letting you phone a friend."

He braced her against the wall with one knee as he used a hand to reach into her jacket and grab her phone. He crushed the phone in his hand and dropped the mangled remains on the dirt floor.

"Wh-what are you going to do to me?" she said, her voice frightened and sounding all of six years old.

He snorted at her to hide the pang of hurt he felt. "I'm not going to kill you, Blondie. Everything I've done is to save your sorry ass, and that's not going to change. You're Liz's daughter, and she loves you. And you're Elena's best friend. And believe it or not, I think you're turning out to be a decent vampire. I just wish you'd stop with the judgments. You're starting to act a little too much like Witchy, and one condescending, judgy bitch is enough. But you have to admit, things are fucked up now, and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do. It's obvious that I can't trust any of you, so if I want to find a way to kill Klaus, I'm going to have to do it alone."

"No," she argued. "No, we can help you. We can figure this out and save Elena and Stefan."

"Funny how I don't believe you. And you'd be better off listening to me when I tell you  ** _not_**  to go after Klaus until we have a plan to kill him. To go after him without that is  ** _suicide_**. Don't do it. Tell the others not to do it. Elena is safe with Stefan for now. We're safe from Klaus hunting us, for now. Don't fuck it up by staging a rescue mission before we're ready," he warned.

He looked at her and saw her terror. His beast was rejoicing in his cruelty, but he took no joy in it, and he was fast becoming disgusted with himself, although he couldn't bring himself to be sorry for his actions. She'd needed to be taught a lesson, and he thought he'd proved his point so he eased up a little.

"I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to do any of this, but I didn't have a choice. I'll have to live with that, but I wouldn't have done anything differently if given the chance, and I won't regret it. But for now, there're things I have to do, and, since I can't trust you, I'm going to have to get you out of the way. I'm sorry for this, but I'll make sure someone knows you're here."

Her eyes flew open wide and the words of denial were on her lips, but she didn't get the chance to say them as he snapped her neck with one quick yank. She fell limp against him, and he steeled the trembling of his heart as he took her lifeless body and dumped it in one of the basement cells. He put two bags of blood in the cell with her because he knew she'd be starving when she woke, then locked her in and went upstairs.

The first thing he did was toss two more bags of blood into the microwave to heat up while he went to look for Gloria's talisman. If Blondie was right, he could expect Bitchy Witchy to arrive shortly after her test was over. He didn't know exactly when that would be, but he figured it'd be soon enough, so he was really hoping that the Good Witch had majicked him his No Mojo bauble.

He was on high alert and feeling vulnerable as he moved silently into the garage and peered into the Camaro's window, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw what appeared to be a pendant made from Black Onyx lying on the front passenger seat. There was a note with it that read "activate with a drop of your blood," so he punctured his thumb on a fang and smeared the blood on the stone. He felt the talisman come on-line and smiled.

' _Thank you, Gloria. I knew you were someone I could count on,'_  he thought as he slipped the silver snake chain over his head.

Back in the kitchen, his meal was ready so he drained both bags then went to his room to take another shower and change clothes because he was splattered with blood. He was just finishing dressing when his Witchy Spidey Sense went off, and he knew Bonnie had arrived.

' _This is going to be good.'_

He feigned ignorance as he made his way from his room back to the living room, pretending nothing was amiss in the least. In a way, he was glad this was going down. For so long, he'd let them order him around, and he'd allowed himself to become a whipped pansy. He'd forgotten what it was like to be a powerful vampire more than capable of slaughtering an entire town in a single night – not that he'd ever done that, that was his brother's thing, but it was nice to remember that he could. And it had been too long since he'd practiced what the Bennett witches had taught him about protecting himself from magic. Back in the day, it was considered a status symbol if a witch had a pet vampire in her repertoire. Emily's daughter hadn't wanted anyone using him but her or her brother, so she'd spent a good bit of time showing him how to detect, thwart and defend himself against magic. At one point, he was rather adept at avoiding witches, and he'd even been able to bend some spells' intent, but he'd let his skills fall by the wayside.

' _Maybe Bill Forbes is right. I_ ** _have_** _gotten lazy. About a lot of things. Time to wake up.'_

His beast raised its head, grinning.  _'Now you see. Now you understand. Let me out and I will take care of everything.'_

He sighed.  _'Not now,'_  he answered, knowing that the full repercussions of what he was going to do today wouldn't hit until later. These were his allies, people he had considered friends – or at least not enemies, and they were showing their true colors. He was betraying them, but they had betrayed him long ago. This was just the inevitable conclusion to a stupidity that he normally would have been smart enough to avoid.

He smelled the Magic coming off her long before he saw her so he wasn't surprised when she stepped in front of him in the hall, hands outstretched, face intent with concentration. He figured she was doing the blood-vessel popping spell, and he was glad his No Mojo necklace appeared to be working because he didn't feel a thing. He didn't let her know that, though, as he grabbed his head and pretended to scream in pain.

He waited until she was within striking distance, continuing to clutch his head and howl in agony, and when she got that condescending, little smirk on her face, he dropped the act and straightened up.

"Not today, Judgy," he growled.

She had enough time to process that her spell hadn't worked before he hit her with a right cross, snapping her head back and knocking her out with one blow. He'd pulled the punch to make sure he just TKO'd her instead of breaking her jaw or killing her, but she'd be out for a while. He caught her falling body before she could hit the back of her head on anything and carried her down to the basement. He thought about putting her in the same cell as Blondie, who was still out for the count, but he decided against putting a live meal in with a wounded vampire. That rarely ended well. He dumped her in the cell next to Blondie's and locked her in. Chances were she could Mojo herself out without any problems, but he figured he had at least an hour before she even started to wake up.

Back in the living room, a calm resignation began to set in as he cataloged the gravity of his actions. He'd left Elena with Klaus. He'd snapped Caroline's neck, and he'd knocked out Bonnie. Both were locked up in separate cells in the basement. He still needed to face Alaric and Jeremy, if only to tell them himself what he had done, although he doubted that their meeting would go any different than it did with Blondie and Witchy.

After everything that had happened, he knew he had to leave town. No matter what, Mystic Falls, his home and safe haven, was no longer a place of refuge and solace for him, and probably wouldn't be for at least fifty years. That hurt more than he thought it would, but the pain of loss was something he was used to. He processed it and moved on.

The grandfather clock read just after noon. Provided Ric and Junior Gilbert finished out the school day, they wouldn't get back to Chez Gilbert until after 3 p.m. That was if they didn't decide to come here and try to kill him in his own house before then. He quickly took out his phone and texted Ric.

:Need 2 talk. Meet me Gilbert house, 4 p.m. Bring Junior.:

He hoped that was clear enough. He didn't get an answer, but in truth he didn't expect one. Ric and he weren't on the best of terms, and they weren't texting buddies even when they were. If they kept to the schedule, that meant he had four hours before he had to be at the Gilbert house. That gave him plenty of time to make the necessary preparations for closing up the house for an extended leave of absence, but only if his "guests" stayed out of his hair.

Humming to himself, he retrieved a vervain dart from his weapons stash, then went to his bathroom. He ran a hand along one of the mirrors and let his fingers catch on the hidden lever, depressing it to release the clasp so he could open the secret cabinet behind the mirror. He selected a small amber-colored bottle of chloroform and reclosed the door. With so many of the townsfolk on vervain these days, he'd found it prudent to keep an alternative method of knocking someone out on hand.

He considered using a pair of his underwear just to get Bitchy's goat, but decided against it, opting for one of his older washcloths instead, then he returned to the basement and the cell he'd put Bonnie in, poured a very small bit of the chloroform (he wanted her knocked out, not dead) on the washcloth and laid the cloth on her face. As long as she was breathing in the vapors, she'd stay unconscious. Giving her a little pat on her cheek, he locked up the cell again and went into Caroline's, deftly injecting her with enough vervain to keep her down for several hours.

"I should do this more often," he commented to himself as he returned the chloroform its hiding place. "When executing a plan, just incapacitate anyone who could even remotely fuck it up. Makes life soooo much easier."

His levity fell flat as he faced his room, knowing that the previous night would be the last one where he would sleep in his favorite bed in a very, very long time, and a melancholy began to settle over him as he went to one of the supply closets on the second floor and drew out a large stack of sheets. Over the course of the next ninety minutes, he proceeded to drape sheets over all of the furniture and more expensive artwork, protecting it from dust and damage, then he made calls to landscaping and property management companies and contracted with them to have the house and grounds looked after. When he was done on the phone, he checked on his guests and found them still out.

He saved his bedroom for last, packing up what clothes he wanted to take with him in a black duffel bag, and storing the rest in his dressers. He took down the artwork and put the pictures and his books in his closet, covering them with a sheet, then he closed the drapes and covered the headboard and mattress of his bed with another sheet. It was a somber task. He loved this room and this house, and it hurt to know he had to leave it, especially under the circumstances.

When he closed the door of the Boarding House behind him and stowed his duffel, several fine vintage bottles of wine and liquor that he was  ** _not_**  leaving behind, and a cooler of blood in the trunk of his Camaro, he felt like he was closing the door on an era in his life. Nothing was going to be the same from now on, and he'd be on his own again. It wasn't anything he hadn't done before, but he'd always had home to come back to. Now he didn't even have that.

He still had two hours before he had to be at the Gilbert house, so he took the time make the final rounds. He visited the Grill for a farewell drink and dropped in on Liz, explaining to her that he was leaving town and wouldn't be back for a long time.

"Does this have anything to do with your brother's disappearance?" she asked as he stood in her office.

"Yes," he answered.

"I wish you luck," the sheriff said. "But I can't say that I'm not going to miss you. You've done a lot for this town, Damon, and for me."

"I'll miss you too, Liz," he told her truthfully. He would miss her. She was a good woman and a good cop. "Take good care of that daughter of yours."

"I will. Now if I could only get rid of my ex-husband," she half joked with a roll of her eyes.

He waggled his eyebrows at her and smiled. "Want me to…" He pantomimed biting, making her chuckle.

"If I remember correctly, you already tried that," she commented.

"Yeah, but I got interrupted by the Morality Brigade," he explained with a smirk and a nonchalant shrug.

Liz laughed, then shook her head. "Thanks, but no thanks."

"I won't be here much longer, after that, you're on your own," he warned.

"I know, and I thank you for the offer, but we'll be okay," she said, smiling, but the smile was strained.

"Yeah, you will. You'll do just fine," he assured her, knowing he would keep tabs on Mystic Falls even if he was an ocean away.

"My only concern is who will supply the vervain with you gone."

"We grow it in the cellar of the Boarding House. I'll leave instructions with Alaric Saltzman on how to maintain and harvest it," he replied.

"That's great. Thank you for everything you've done, Damon. My daughter doesn't have a high opinion of you, but I know how much you've done for us."

Realizing that he was probably seeing her for the last time, he stepped forward and kissed her gently on the forehead. "No, Liz, thank  ** _you_**."

When he pulled away he saw the thin sheen of tears brimming her eyes, and he knew she really  ** _was_**  going to miss him. The one person who should hate him and stake him on sight, was the one who had seen him for who he was the most – that and Ric, but Ric had ended up letting his hate cloud his vision.

"I really am going to miss you," she whispered.

He stroked her cheek with one finger. "I know. I'm really going to miss you, too."

"Will I ever see you again?"

"Probably not. I doubt I'll be back here in your mortal lifetime," he admitted with regret.

"That's what I thought," she sighed with some measure of sadness.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he knew he'd gotten a text message. He pulled it out and saw it was from Ric. It was just after three. Teacher must have had his phone in his desk and only now checked his messages.

:Where's Elena?: it read.

"I gotta go, Liz," he said. "Take care of yourself."

"You too, Damon. Good bye."

It sounded so final, and his heart began to ache. He walked out of her office without saying good bye himself. He hated good byes.

:With Stefan,: he texted back as he exited the police station. Well, it was true, wasn't it?

The next text didn't come for another ten minutes, and by then he was already at the library where he intended to go to write his letter about how to grow vervain. A vampire leaving instructions on how to raise an herb that could thwart compulsion and incapacitate him? How ironic was that?

:We'll be here,: Ric's message said, and he knew the dice had been cast. It was now just a matter of seeing what they rolled.

He wrote two letters. One was detailed instructions on how to grow, harvest and dry vervain. The other was a complete account of everything that had happened in Chicago – minus the personal parts about his time with Elena and their fights. He knew that he needed  ** _some_**  way of making them understand if he couldn't get them to listen to him, so he wrote it all down, including the bits about him following Stefan from California in 1922, and the discovery that Stefan's friend, Nick, was actually Klaus. He wrote about Gloria, and the spell she did on Stefan. How she knew about Elena and what her blood could do. He told them that Stefan knew, and that he was under Klaus's control. He warned them about Rebekah, and her role as a complete Wild Card in the whole situation. He reiterated what he'd told Caroline about the suicidal stupidity of going after Klaus before they had discovered a way to kill an Original, and warned them not to try to rescue Elena until they had a workable plan in place. He did everything to make them comprehend the reality and gravity of the situation in hopes that they would understand. He only prayed they didn't burn the letters without reading them.

As he wrote, a detachment began to settle over him. Once again he was sacrificing everything for people who really couldn't give a shit about him. He was losing his home, his "friends," his colleagues, his brother, and the love of his life. All because he cared too much, loved too much, and tried too hard for those who would never see him for who he really was, nor would they even care to look. Why? Why did he do that to himself? It devastated him every time it happened, and it took him years to put himself back together.

It was almost enough to make him flip the switch.

His beast heard his mental ramblings and came to the front of its cage.

' _Let me out. You know you want to. I can make the pain go away,'_  it promised with a seductive purr.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to turn it off for a while. Maybe by the time he turned it back on, he wouldn't hurt so much. His beast retreated without a taunt or a goad, probably because it knew it had already won, and now all that was left was the waiting to be set free.

He finished the letters at 3:50 p.m., and by the time he had put the last period on the last sentence, he had already begun to leave Mystic Falls. He erected a wall of cool detachment, an emotional distance that helped him look at the situation objectively and plan for what might happen once he got to the Gilbert house. He knew he could skip the reunion and just leave town, and that probably was the safest option, but he owed it to Ric and Jeremy to face them and tell them what had happened, even if he knew he was most likely walking into an ambush. If they tried to blitz him, he had to be ready to fight, but he was really hoping that they'd at least pretend to listen. If they did, they might actually learn something.

He tucked the letters into the inside pocket of his jacket and returned out to his car. It was exactly 4 p.m. when he parked the Camaro in front of Elena's house and walked into the lion's den.

 


	15. Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Damon debated just going right in, but that was probably what they expected him to do, so he knocked on the door and waited instead, just to get them off their game. Junior answered, looking both furious and terrified at the same time, and stinking of fear. He gave Jeremy a nod, stepping through the door, but stopping short of letting the young man behind him. He waited for Junior to close the door and move around him (giving him a wide berth, he noticed) to stand beside Ric who was there in the living room, staking him with his eyes. Damon had no doubt that his vampire hunter friend had at least four weapons at his fingertips, and he could smell the vervain on Junior underneath the scent of fear.

He faced them, but he did not let them get between him and the door. Yes, he could go right through the wall or window if he had to, but it would hurt a lot more. They looked at each other, none of them speaking, and he played the theme music from  _The Good, The Bad and The Ugly_  in his head until he got sick of waiting. He just wanted to get this over with so he could leave, so he broke the silence with a suggestion.

"You might want to sit down for this," he told them in a serious voice, the voice he used when things were real, and he was not playing around.

"We'll stand if it's all the same to you," Ric answered tightly.

He shrugged. "Suit yourself. I am guessing you both got the same text as Witchy and Blondie?"

His acknowledgement of the text and the girls' knowledge of it, and their conspicuous absence, made fury cross Ric's face.

"Where are they? If you've harmed them, so help me God…" Ric threatened, taking a step forward.

"They're locked up in the basement of the Boarding house, both unconscious. Well… Blondie's dead, but she'll get over it," he replied with a roll of his eyes. "And I'll have you know that both of them attacked me first, and I did nothing more than defend myself. With considerable restraint, by the way, since both of them survived the encounter, but I am done being your punching bag, both metaphorically and physically."

They didn't have much to say to that, but he noticed that they both cast each other questioning glances. Who were they trying to be? Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? He had to stop himself from laughing out loud.

"Bonnie texted me and told me she was going to see if you had come back to Mystic Falls. She and Caroline were going to the Boarding house to talk to you," Junior Gilbert told him.

"Bullshit. Witchy tried to give me a brain hemorrhage and Blondie attacked me. I  _ **didn't**_  kill them, which says a lot more about me than it does about them," he replied with a sneer.

"Elena's text said that she was Klaus's prisoner in Chicago," Junior said, his voice angry but calm. He was looking at Damon with a mix of wariness and disbelief, as if he couldn't believe Damon could do such a thing.

' _Disappointment's a bitch, isn't it, kid?'_  he thought dourly, but said aloud, "Yeah, about that…"

" _ **What did you do!"**_  Ric demanded, interrupting.

"You know what I did," he said calmly. "I left Elena with Klaus… and Stefan."

"Stefan is ripping people apart and putting them back together again!" Ric seethed, his fists clenched at his sides.

"I know. I saw the same kills you did. Hell, I've been looking at his version of Mr. Potato Head for the last 145 years," he answered sarcastically.

"How could you…" his friend accused, shaking his head.

"I did it to keep us all alive," he stated clearly. "The reason Klaus can't make hybrids is because they need Elena's blood to complete their transition. It was a failsafe built into the spell. If the curse was ever broken, it ensured that Klaus wouldn't be able to make any more like him because the doppelganger was supposed to be dead."

"But because we were successful in keeping her alive, we gave him what he needed," Jeremy breathed, realization dawning on his face.

"Exactly. I knew there was a reason I wanted you to apply to Harvard," he quipped, but then moved on. "I found this out when we got to Chicago, and I dropped in on a witch I knew back in the 20's. Klaus and Stefan had already been to see her, and she had done a bloodletting spell on Stefan to get him to talk. She knew Elena was alive, and she knew the blood of the doppelganger was the key to making more hybrids. If she was the only one who knew, it would have been different. She would have died before she let that secret out, but  _ **Stefan**_ knew, too, and it was just a matter of time before he told Klaus because he's compelled to be Klaus's bitch. Once Klaus knew Elena was still alive, he would have come back here and slaughtered his way through the town to get her."

"We could have stopped him," Junior insisted.

"In case you hadn't noticed, it's impossible to kill an Original, and none of our plans even slowed Klaus down," he snapped back. "And to add another wrinkle to the mix, Klaus woke up his sister, Rebekah, so we would've had  _ **two**_  Originals to fight, and Blondie Klaus is worse than her big bro. Not to mention that she and Stefan have a  _ **history**_  if you catch my drift, and they've sort of picked up where they left off."

"So you left Elena with two Original vampires and your brother whose gone Ripper," Ric said hatefully.

"Yes. If Klaus wants to make more hybrids he needs Elena alive, so he won't harm her, and there's enough of my brother left in him that he'll protect Elena. She's safe with him for now, and we have the time we need to figure out how to kill an Original and plan a rescue mission."

Ric shook his head, his breathing heavy enough that he was snorting through his nostrils. "We? There is no  _ **we**_. You bastard! You left her there! I told you that if anything happened to Elena, I'd  _ **kill**_  you!"

Ric pulled out one of his newly designed wooden bullet shooting handguns and aimed it at him. He did notice that Ric wasn't targeting his heart, so his intent really wasn't to kill him, but to incapacitate him. Still, it didn't make him feel any better that his "friend" was pulling a potentially fatal weapon on him.

" _ **Ric, no!"**_  Jeremy cried, but it was too late.

Ric fired and the bullet hit Damon in the shoulder, but Damon was already moving, not away from, but  _ **towards**_  the gun, and he was on Ric before he had a chance to fire a second shot. Snarling, he grabbed his friend and snapped his neck, dropping body to the floor just as he heard Junior pull the pin on a vervain grenade. He dodged, avoiding the spray enough to keep it off his face and out of his eyes, and rounded on the boy.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said with sincerity and clocked him one on the jaw, knocking him out the same way he did Witchy.

He refused to kill Jeremy even if he  _ **did**_  have an Eternity ring because he promised himself he would never kill Elena's brother again.

When it was over, both Ric and Junior Gilbert were splayed out on the living room floor, and he was bleeding from the gunshot wound and burning from the vervain that had splashed all over him from the grenade. Both hurt like a bitch, and he knew he had to do some triage before he could quit Mystic Falls for good.

"Well… that went well," he said to no one as he surveyed the damage to his shoulder and his hands. It was a damn good thing he had such a high tolerance for pain otherwise he'd be screaming like a little girl.

He went out to his car for a change of clothes and some bags of blood, then he returned to the house, secure in the knowledge that neither human would be waking any time soon. He drank two blood bags as he climbed the stairs to the bathroom. He stripped, tossing the bloodied shirt and vervain soaked clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor, very glad that he had left his leather jacket in the Camaro in anticipation of a clothes-damaging fight. He hadn't wanted the one thing that he still had that smelled like Elena to be ruined.

The bullet was still lodged in the wound so he gritted his teeth and dug it out with his fingers and a set of eyebrow tweezers he found in the medicine cabinet. He grunted in pain as he pried into his flesh, seeing stars until he pulled the bullet free, then he dropped the wooden projectile into the sink, bloody spatter and all. His skin was burning and blistering from the vervain, so he got into the tub and took a  _ **third**_  shower for the day, scrubbing himself clean with some of Elena's flowery body wash. He even used her Herbal Essence shampoo to get the vervain out of his hair. He was glad for his vampire healing because his burns and the bullet wound were gone by the time the hot water ran out. When he was done, he dried himself off and put on the clothes he'd retrieved from his car, including his leather jacket with the letters he'd written.

As he exited the bathroom, he cast a longing look at Elena's bedroom, and he hesitantly made his way into the place that still smelled the most like her. Her scent surrounded him as he sat on her bed and picked up her teddy bear, and he held the stuffed toy close as he bowed his head. How had it come to this? Just a few short months ago he had been close to death, but closer to Elena than he'd ever been. She'd curled beside him in his bed and held his hand. She'd told him she forgave him, and she'd kissed him. He'd told her he loved her. They'd spent the summer together looking for Stefan, surviving the pain of loss, and becoming closer. They'd cooked dinner in her kitchen, and watched movies late into the night. He'd made it his mission to protect her, and,  _ **yes**_ , he'd hoped that she'd see the man in him and give them a chance.

He knew it was wrong to hide Stefan's kills from her, but he hadn't wanted to be the one to destroy her vision of him as the perfect boyfriend. He hadn't wanted to be the one who caused her that pain. He'd been on the verge of telling her so many times, but the fear of seeing her face when he burst her bubble made him stop every time. She'd missed Stefan so much. So many nights he'd sat on the roof or in the tree by her window, guarding her just in case anyone should come looking for her, and listened to her cry herself to sleep. It had broken his heart, even more so because he knew he didn't have the right to comfort her. He tried to do it during the daylight hours when they were together. He did it in small ways like making her favorite foods or buying her a cup of her favorite coffee. He'd let her choose the movies they would watch, and he even helped Junior Gilbert with his homework. All of it little ways of showing her that he knew she was hurting and he cared. The really sad part was, he'd thought he was making progress with her until Ric told him to take a beat… and Caroline had to go and trash him to Elena just to throw salt on the wound.

Now chances were he'd never be able to comfort her again. His decision to give her to Klaus had destroyed any chance he'd had with her of ever being her choice. It had been the ultimate betrayal, and she would never forgive him for it. Even if she eventually came to understand that he'd done it to save her and the ones she loved, she would still always remember the day he'd handed her to their enemy and walked away. This time he really  _ **had**_  lost her forever, and he had only himself to blame. The pain of that reality hit him so hard he nearly went blind from it. It hurt more than the gunshot wound, more than the burning of the vervain, because it was a pain that came from within him and there was no easing it. Clutching the bear, he took several, ragged breaths, trying to beat the agony back before it ate him alive.

His beast appeared at the door of its cage, but it didn't say anything. It didn't have to. The question was clear, as was his answer.

' _Yes.'_  But not now. He needed to hold it together for a little bit longer.

He looked around the bedroom, taking note of how empty it felt without Elena's life force humming through it. She'd been gone for only a couple of days, but the room already felt abandoned. Soon her scent would fade completely, and there'd be nothing left of her for him to cling to. He resisted the urge to take the bear, setting it down gently on the bed in its usual place near the headboard. If he found it odd that an eighteen year-old girl still slept with a teddy bear, he'd never let her know. Her attachment to the child's toy had been endearing.

He stood and walked over to her dresser. He remembered rifling through her top drawer the first time she'd invited him into her bedroom. He'd done it mostly to yank her chain, especially when he'd pulled out her lacy bra. A man could learn a lot about a woman by the lingerie she kept, and Elena's always reflected her dual personality. Modest, demure cotton panties were mixed in with sexy thongs and lace bikinis, and her bras… there was a red satin one that made his eyebrows go right up into his hairline.

Part of him wanted to open the drawer just to see if it was as he remembered, but another didn't because half the reason he'd opened it in the first place was because he'd known it would annoy her. Without Elena there to roll her eyes at his antics, there was no point, or joy, in going panty diving. Instead, he raised his eyes to her gilded mirror, or more importantly, to the pictures of her that she had tucked into the edge. There was a photo of her with Stefan in the period outfits they wore for the Miss Mystic Falls float, and he scowled at it until his sharp eyes registered that the photo was a bit thicker than the others. He realized that there was  _ **another**_  picture hidden behind it, and he used his fingers to gently pull the second photo out from behind the one on top.

It was a picture taken as he and Elena were exiting the Forbes mansion on the day Stefan had tried to eat that annoying Amy girl and had rabbited on Elena before their Miss Mystic Falls dance. He'd done the gallant gentleman thing and had stepped in to fill his brother's absent shoes. The photo was taken just as they came out of the house. Elena was gorgeous in her blue dress and he was doing his best not to ogle her as they held hands and presented themselves to the waiting crowd. The fact that she had kept the picture, and had even valued it enough to put it on her dresser mirror, choked him up all over again.

He debated keeping it, but feared that it would get destroyed, so he put it back and chose a smaller picture of her that would easily fit in his wallet. He tucked it into his back pocket until he had a chance to properly store it, then he took one last sweep of the room with his eyes, letting his memories wash over him as they replayed in his mind's eye. The night he'd snuck into her room while she slept and gently stroked her face. The day she had called him to discuss Stefan's blood drinking. The countless times he'd brought her home. The night he'd told her he loved her then compelled her to forget. The time when he'd stood at the window and gave her hope of getting Stefan back when he'd told her he could be saved.

' _Famous last words.'_

His eye caught sight of her laundry basket full of undone laundry, and he cocked his head. Setting his jaw, he went over to the basket and rifled through it, pulling out one of her sleep tank tops and a pair of her underwear – a racy red lace boy short that made him whistle and shake his head. He put the red panties to his nose and breathed deep, taking in the heady aroma that was uniquely Elena, then he tucked the items in the waistband of his jeans. He knew it would be considered gross and deviant by human standards, but they couldn't understand how important scent was to a vampire. Scent was everything. In many ways it was more important than sight. Scent defined a vampire's world, and yet it was impossible to describe to anyone who didn't have heightened senses. He wanted, no he  _ **needed**_ , something of Elena's that smelled like her, if only to help him keep a tiny hold on his humanity once he let the beast out. Elena had been the one to show him the way back to himself. It was only right that she would be the one to help him stay there.

With one last sad look at Elena's room, he left it and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch sounded so final that he flinched, and he swallowed the sudden lump in his throat as he headed down the stairs. Ric and Jeremy were still out when he walked into the living room so he took the time to put Ric on the couch and Jeremy into one of the overstuffed chairs with an ottoman, arranging them so they would be in comfortable positions when they woke. He then left his letters on the side table underneath an unopened bottle of 32 year old Evan Williams bourbon. It was a token apology, but he hoped they would understand.

He left the house, closing and locking the door behind him, but he didn't go far. He sat on the porch swing, sipping bourbon from his silver flask and waiting for them to revive. He needed to make sure they were both okay before he took a permanent beat. The beast was standing at the bars of its cage, but he was ignoring it. It's time would come, but for now he was letting himself feel for the last time in God knows how long it would be. He opened his heart completely and let himself look at the damage. The wave of emotion came at him, crested and broke, and he broke with it.

He let the regret and sorrow roll over him until tears ran down his cheeks. He hadn't let himself cry in so, so long, and it would probably be centuries before he let himself do it again, so it was best to get it all out now. He wept for everything that had happened, for the choices he had made, for the choices  _ **she**_  had made, and for how different things could have been if they had made different ones. He wept for the loss of his makeshift family, for his brother (again) and for the woman he loved (again.) He grieved for deaths of Jenna and Rose and Andie – all good women who got caught in the craziness that was his life and had paid the ultimate price. He cried for the loss of his home and safe haven, and he worried about what those left behind would do now that he wouldn't be there to protect them from themselves.

He let himself feel all of it, let it crash over him and smash him into the rocks. He let the pain run rivers of fire through him and make his brain explode. He let his heart shatter, and his soul scream in agony. But always he kept a tiny hold on his sanity in the comfort of Elena's scent and the feel of the lace under his thumb. He was battered, but refused to be swept out to sea, until slowly, slowly the wave began to recede, and he could think again. He grabbed the pain and stuffed it back into its box, as he got a hold of himself and stopped his tears.

' _Okay. That's enough,'_  he scolded himself, sniffling and wiping his eyes.  _'No more blubbering like a pansy. Real men don't cry. They go out and kill things.'_

His beast heartily agreed, but even though he intended to let it out, he also intended to keep it on a short leash.

' _Just enough to make the worst of the pain go away, and for just enough time for it to drop down to a dull roar,'_  he promised himself, feeling guilty for doing something he knew would upset Elena. She'd always seemed more invested in his humanity than he was, and he wondered if she knew the role she'd played in him turning his switch back on in the first place.

Calmer now and idly rocking the porch swing back and forth with the toe of his boot, he stayed until he heard Ric groan as he came back to life. He listened as the man slowly got up, cursing in multiple languages, and shook off the disorientation of being dead. He'd already forgiven Ric for shooting him. Elena and Jeremy were all he had left of both Jenna and Isobel, and he'd begun filling the role of father-figure to them. He'd noticed the man getting more and more protective of the kids, Elena especially, so it was understandable that he'd be furious when Damon left her with Klaus. Hell, if he'd been in Ric's place, he doubted that he would've even let himself get a word in before he ripped his head off.

Besides, what's a little carnage among friends? He'd killed Ric… twice, so the fact that Ric shot him with a wooden bullet seemed fair enough to him, and he wasn't really one to hold a grudge unless his brother was involved.

"Fuck. Not again," he heard Ric complain, then gasp when he obviously saw Junior on the chair. "Jeremy! Oh God, no."

The sound of staggering footsteps told him that Ric had stood up and was now making his way over to the boy. He heard the rustle of fabric and Ric's sigh of relief when he obviously realized that Jeremy was alive.

"Oh, thank god," Ric sighed, then he heard him begin shaking the boy and calling his name. "Jeremy. Jeremy, c'mon, wake up. Wake up, Jer."

After a few tense moments where even Damon was getting worried, Jeremy finally gasped and let out a strangled moan. Damon let out the breath he'd been holding waiting for the boy to regain consciousness and nodded. There. They would both be okay now.

He stood up from his seat on the swing and carefully slipped his flask back into the interior pocket of his leather jacket. The beast began pacing near the door of its cell, but he was holding it back for just a moment longer.

Now he would leave Mystic Falls. The town held too many memories and too many people who wanted him dead for him to be of any use to anyone. He'd come back in a few decades after everyone had died. That was the beauty of immortality – and its curse. He wasn't sure where he would go. Maybe somewhere warm and fun like Italy or Latin America. Somewhere where the women's passions ran hot, and their blood hotter, and they were always happy to see him.

He was also hoping that going to places much older than the United States would help him find witches who might know how to kill an Original Vampire. He was thinking of starting in Bulgaria where Katerina Petrova was born.  _ **Someone**_  had to know something about Petrova doppelgangers there. Maybe that same person would have insights on how to permanently kill Klaus. It was a place to begin, anyway.

"Ah! Fuck! What the hell happened?" he heard Jeremy say, his voice full of confusion and discomfort.

"Looks like Damon TKO'd you."

"Was I dead?"

"I don't think so. You'd know if you were. Looks like he just knocked you out."

There were more moans and the sounds of someone rubbing flesh. "Feels like he clocked me in the jaw."

"He packs a punch," Ric said.

"Yeah, but he could've killed me, and he didn't. Why?"

"Who the hell knows what's going on in that asshole's head?"

"Ah. Yeah. I guess. I got him though. Hit him with a vervain grenade. He should've  _ **wanted**_  to kill me."

Damon bowed his head and let one last tear roll down his cheek before wiping it roughly away. The kid got it, and it was a shame it was too late for any of them. When he looked up, the beast was staring back at him with blood-filled eyes. He nodded, pursing his lips, and it grinned a sharp-toothed smile. It was gracious in its victory, however brief it would be.

He drew himself up and took one more breath. One more pang. One more twinge of his heart before he let it all go. The beast waited. It knew how to be patient. Another moment, another pause before doing the inevitable.

"I don't know why he didn't, but I can promise you that we're doing to hunt that son-of-a-bitch down and kill  _ **him**_ ," he heard Alaric reply.

He nodded silently in agreement. He expected nothing less.

It was time. The beast came close to the door of the cage. Resolutely, he reached out, lifted the last lock from the bars, and set himself free.

FIN


	16. Preview: The Rain King

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Preview of Queen's sequel: The Rain King

**A/N A preview of Queen's sequel, The Rain King. Look for it to be posted separately very soon.**

The Rain King

By Terri Botta

Summary: Sequel to The Queen of Unintended Consequences. Six years after Damon leaves Elena with Klaus, he's called back to handle a delicate situation. An AU Season 3 fic.

Disclaimer: All rights to  _The Vampire Diaries_  belong to Kevin Williamson, Julie Plec, L.J. Smith and the CW. I just take them out and play with them. No money, no infringement intended, yadda yadda yadda. I'm poor so don't sue.

* * *

Chapter One

He was living in Italy when he received the summons. The strange vampire hybrid found him one hot July afternoon in the villa he was renting on the Amalfi Coast. Some investments of his had paid off in spades, so he had decided to forgo his usual foreclosure squatting in deference to living a somewhat modest, but comfortable, life just outside of Praiano.

These were his mother's people, heralding from the bustling city of Naples, and, with his dashing good looks and flawless Old World Italian, he had fit right in. He'd spent a blissful four months surrounded by lemon groves, olive trees, good wine and hot women with the cerulean blue waters of the Mediterranean as his backdrop, and he hadn't been this content in the six years since he had made the most difficult decision of his life – or unlife as the case may be.

It had been a hard six years. A very hard six years. Harder in its helplessness and lack of progress. Harder in its lack of anything that could help him get rid of Klaus and wrench Elena away from his brother. In fact, the last six years had been an exercise in futility and frustration.

It seemed that things had started going wrong the moment he'd left Mystic Falls. It wasn't three weeks later that he'd been sitting in the back room of a voodoo shop in New Orleans, meeting with some witches related to Emily Bennett's son when one of them began to shriek. Soon the others followed, and he'd gotten a very,  _ **very**_  bad feeling. Witches knew when one of their blood was killed, and their keening made his already cool blood run colder.

When the wailing had finally stopped, they'd looked at him, and he'd known without them having to tell him that Bonnie Bennett was dead. A few moments later, his phone buzzed, and he was treated to a picture of her lifeless body, eyes staring straight ahead, in a message from his darling baby bro. He'd smashed his phone to bits right there, but he'd never erased the image of her blank stare out of his mind.

He'd been so angry. Enraged even, because he'd warned them not to try to rescue Elena before they had a plan. His beast was still in primary control, but he'd tethered it for the night, and he'd almost released it so he could drive back to Mystic Falls and kill everyone there who'd been stupid enough to go along with that suicide mission. It was only the entreaties of the witches that more death would not solve the issue nor would it kill Klaus that stopped him, but he had to admit that it had lit a fire under their pointy shoes to get rid of the Original Were-Vamp once and for all.

He wouldn't learn what had happened that night until many months later when Katherine found him in San Francisco. She'd come up to him in a bar one night as he tried to find a willing participant in Find, Feed, Fuck, and Make 'em Forget, and he'd nearly tossed her out on her ear. It wasn't until she'd blurted that she had news of Elena that he'd relented, and she told him the tale.

Witchy and Blondie had staged a rescue, bringing along Blondie's mutt, Lockwood. He was relieved to know that neither Ric nor Junior had been part of it, so at least  _ **someone**_  had listened to him. Witchy had magicked them into where Klaus was keeping Elena, but she didn't have enough Mojo to magick them back out. In the course of their escape, they were caught. Klaus had killed Bonnie outright, but he'd tortured Blondie with a werewolf bite. It wasn't until Mutt offered to turn hybrid in trade for Blondie's life that Klaus had relented, although Katherine thought Elena's hysterics might have had something to do with it. Regardless, the results were that Tyler became a hybrid, and Caroline became a minion of Klaus's, serving as Rebekah's handmaiden. Klaus had also compelled Elena after the botched rescue fiasco, and she was now bound to stay with him and not try to escape, so any further attempts to retrieve her would require force and a heavy dose of vervain.

Damon blamed himself for Bonnie's death. If he'd stayed in Mystic Falls, he might have been able to prevent them from executing their insane plan. Then again, if he'd stayed, they probably would have ganged up on him and killed him, so wondering how he could have stopped them was a moot point. But still, the loss of Bonnie Bennett was a severe blow. As young and arrogant as the witch might have been, she did have talent, and he could have trusted her to do whatever it took to free Elena from Klaus's clutches. Once she was gone, he'd needed to find another witch who was willing to take on the Originals, and those were in short supply.

Katherine had left him in San Francisco after staying a day or two and accepting the fact that no matter what she did, or how hard she tried, he wasn't going to sleep with her. He didn't really know why she bothered or why she didn't realize that seeing her was agony because she wore Elena's face. She found him again when he was in Peru hunting down an Incan shaman who had ties to the Bennett line. By then nearly nine months had passed since that fateful night in Chicago, and the pain was becoming more bearable.

The scent of Elena on his jacket and the clothes he'd taken from her bedroom had faded, but he'd had a custom pocket watch made that he kept on him at all times. On first glance it looked like a normal pocket watch, but upon closer examination, one would find a small latch on either side that popped open a secret compartment. One side had a picture of Elena – the one he'd taken from her mirror. The other had a small bundle of her hair rolled into a thin twist. The hair had come from his Camaro. Apparently some of it had gotten snagged in the stop gap of the seat belt at some point and several strands of hair had been ripped out. He'd found the hair when he was cleaning out the car to be prepared for long-term storage. He'd also found more hair clinging to the passenger seat, and he'd painstakingly plucked each strand until he had enough to make the twist. The watch joined the other two items that never left his person: his daylight ring and his No Mojo necklace, and whenever he felt the world spinning out of control, he would stroke its gold surface with his thumb to calm himself down.

In Peru, Katherine had found him in Lima just after he'd finished his quest. His search for the shaman had been both successful and a waste of time. Successful in that he'd found the man; a waste of time in that he'd known nothing of use. He'd been profoundly disappointed and pissed off, because not only had the trip been a wash-out, but he'd been forced to live on blood bags and llamas while he was out in the remote villages, and he'd developed quite a loathing for the hairy, ill-tempered beasts.

That time he  _ **had**_  slept with Katherine, mostly because he hadn't had sex in nearly a month, and it was either fuck her or go kill a Quechua Indian. He'd toyed with the idea of doing both since his beast was sure to agree, but he'd decided against it because the Incans had Old Magic that he hadn't wanted to be on the receiving end of if he'd pissed someone off. In the afterglow and pillow talk, Katherine had filled him in on the happenings back in the States, and she had a few surprises for him.

Surprises like there was still quite a bit of spunk left in Elena, even though Klaus had killed her friend, turned Tyler Lockwood into a hybrid, enslaved Blondie, and compelled her not to run away. In retaliation, Elena had found where Klaus was keeping Elijah and the rest of his siblings (turns out there were five Originals, all from the same family,) and she'd undaggered them all – waking Elijah and his two brothers, Finn and Kol.

Finn had disappeared almost right away; going off in search of a vampiress named Sage, a vampire he'd known himself from back in the early 1900's. She and he had been lovers for a time, and she'd taught him how to enjoy being a vampire. He knew Sage had been turned by Finn, but he hadn't realized that Finn had been an Original.

Kol left, too, after a short while, wanting to experience the changes that had happened to the world after Klaus had daggered him, but Elijah had stayed. Katherine reported that he was half in love with Elena, and Damon added him to the list of potential allies, though he had serious reservations about trusting him.

He'd been proud to hear that Elena still had some fight in her, but he'd been enraged to find out that Klaus had broken her back as punishment, paralyzing her from the waist down. Her injury was thankfully short-lived, however, when Elijah fed her his blood as payment for freeing him. Damon was grateful. He didn't know what he would have done if Katherine had told him that Elena was still disabled, as it was, he was furious enough to learn that it had taken her weeks to learn how to walk again.

Katherine had had no sympathy for her doppelganger, saying that Elena had brought it on herself. Damon had kicked her out of his hotel room stark naked and threw her clothes at her, stating that, if she did not get out of his sight, he would do his level best to kill her. He didn't know exactly what it was about his threat, but she took him seriously and vanished.

From Peru, he'd followed a lead given to him by Gloria, and he took her down into Haiti to meet with some bokors. During a ritual that involved a number of sacrificed chickens and an enormous amount of rum, he'd gotten his first real lead on a weapon that could kill an Original. Turned out the Loa weren't too happy the curse was broken either, and they'd been willing to toss him a bone. Nothing was truly immortal or invincible. Always there would be a vulnerability, however small, that could end a creature's life. As with all vampires, wood was lethal. In the case of Original vampires, a very specific wood was deadly: the wood of a sacred white oak tree. Such trees were very, very rare, but a stake carved from the branch of one would permanently kill an Original if it punctured the heart. Ash from a sacred white oak that had burned was what had coated the dagger that had immobilized Elijah.

When he'd asked the bokors where he could find a sacred white oak, their answer had been vague. In keeping with Loa's habit of making you work for it, all that had been given was the hint that the answer he sought was somewhere in his family's history. Maybe they'd thought that they were being mysterious by saying that, but he knew full well that the Salvatores had owned and operated the lumber mills in Mystic Falls, and if the tree in question had been on Salvatore land, it had most certainly been cut down. If that was the case, the milling records kept in the Salvatore library would tell him when the tree was harvested, and where the wood went after it was milled.

So ten months after he'd left Mystic Falls for good, he'd found himself sneaking back to rifle through dozens of dusty, handwritten ledgers. The information he was looking for was in the ledger for 1912, and he'd been mildly amused to find that the tree had been cut down and used in the building of none other than the Wickery Bridge. God, he loved irony, especially when he'd given quite a bit of money to the "Wickery Bridge Restoration Fund" prior to leaving Mystic Falls. Much of the original wood under the bridge had been ripped out and replaced with steel girders, and he'd seen the wood stacked in piles meant to be recycled into other projects. Most of it had already been repurposed, but he knew for a fact that the original sign from the bridge was still there because Carol Lockwood had given it to Ric to be restored. He'd waited for nightfall, then headed out to the bridge, ripped down the wooden sign, and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone had known that he'd come back.

The sign had made twelve Original killing stakes, half of which he'd hidden in secret caches around the globe, but he'd given Gloria two. He'd wanted to test the stakes out on an Original that wasn't Klaus, just to be sure they worked, so he'd set about trying to track down Kol or Finn.

Katherine had found him a third time in Seattle, which had seemed far too much of a coincidence to him. His No Mojo necklace should have dispelled any tracking spells that were placed on him so she shouldn't have been able to find him that way. In the pursuit of getting her into a compromising position where he would be able to subdue her, he'd fucked her senseless, using every one of his considerable lovemaking skills to exhaust her and make her vulnerable. If his prowess had surprised her, she didn't say, but he could tell that she'd been impressed.

That stood to reason because he'd been just shy of virginal when he'd met her, and pretty much everything he'd known about proper lovemaking in 1864 he'd learned from her. But they'd had such a short time together, and the interim 145 years had given him many decades to perfect his craft. When she was sleeping the sleep of the sexually sated, he'd snuck out of bed and gathered the items he'd amassed for his next move.

He'd known that she was taking vervain to build up an immunity to it, but there were herbs that could be added to vervain to increase its potency, and thanks to Gloria, he'd known how to brew a batch of super-charged vervain, which he'd put in a set of darts. He'd used one on Katherine, drugging her just enough to make her too weak to break the chains he'd put on her.

"Well... this looks familiar," she'd said, taking in her position on the chair he'd chained her to.

"Ya, think?" he'd replied, raising an eyebrow.

"Not that I not impressed by your deviousness, but to what do I owe this honor?"

He'd pulled up a chair, swung it around so the back faced her, and straddled it. It had been one of those chairs that had thin wooden posts that could easily be ripped out and used as a makeshift stake. He'd seen her eye the chair, and he'd known she'd taken it for the subtle threat it was.

"You're tracking me. I'm immune to magic, so I want to know how you're doing it."

"Maybe I just have a better witch than you do," she'd taunted.

He'd fingered the slats on the chair and took pleasure in her uncomfortable look.

"Okay. We knew we couldn't cast a spell on you, so it was cast on me. Since it was my blood that made you, it could be used to help me find you. I get a feeling of a general direction to go, and it gets stronger as I get closer."

He'd brushed aside the tidbit about using a maker's blood to find an offspring, and focused on the other part of her statement. "We? Are you in cahoots with Klaus?"

"Klaus? Fuck no," she'd answered with disgust.

"Then who?" he'd pressed.

"Stefan."

" _ **Stefan?**_  Why would my brother want you to track  _ **me?**_ "

She'd rolled her eyes at him like he was an idiot. "Because he knows you're trying to kill Klaus."

"And he wants to stop me…"

"No."

"He's Klaus's little bitch. Of course he wants you to stop me," he'd countered with a sneer.

"I might have slipped him some vervain," she'd admitted with mock guilt.

The news had shocked him. "So if Stefan isn't Klaus's bitch anymore, why is he staying with him?"

Katherine had given him a look. "You know why."

He'd sighed. "Elena."

"Without a way to kill Klaus, even if he was to take my little doppelganger away, Klaus would just hunt them down and kill anyone who helped them."

"True."

"Any progress on that?" she'd asked, batting her eyes at him.

He'd wanted so badly to tell her his plans, but he'd known better. No matter what, Katherine would always put herself first, and she could not be trusted. He'd avoided the question by releasing her from the chains, but she wouldn't be deterred as she's stood and faced him.

"Damon?"

"The less you know, the better," he'd said, a little wary of her.

"But you do have a plan right?"

He'd given her a cocky smile. "I always have a plan, Katherine, but you of all people should know how they work out. Best for you to skedaddle like you usually do."

"I know Finn is in Seattle, Damon," she'd told him, her eyes getting angry and maybe even a little worried. "You can't be thinking of facing down an Original alone."

"Now now, Katherine, you need to be careful. It almost sounds like you care."

"I do care. I do care about you, Damon," she'd insisted with as much sincerity as he'd ever heard from her, but it had been too little, too late, and it had only made him angry.

"No one cares about me, Katherine. I don't even care about me," he'd snapped.

He'd seen her flinch at his harsh words, and she shook her head. "Don't do anything stupid."

"Now why would I do that?" he'd countered with an innocent look, then relented. "I was being truthful when I said the less you know the better, Katherine. If things go wrong, you can't be implicated. You'd best go on back to wherever Klaus is keeping his little entourage."

"Ironically, they're in Vegas," she'd said.

He'd chuckled softly and shook his head. "Better than Cleveland, I guess. Go on, Katherine. Get as far away from here as you can. You want no part of this."

"This better not be the last time I see you," she'd warned.

"Right. The last time we had something to use against an Original, you admitted to letting me use it even though it would have meant my death. Somehow I doubt you've had a change of heart."

"Is that so hard for you to believe?" she'd asked, all hurt and offended. It hadn't fooled him for a second.

"Yes. You don't change, Katherine. You're the same manipulative, lying bitch you were 147 years ago. Now you'd best get out of here."

He could tell that she hadn't wanted to leave, but she'd done as he'd asked, and left the vacant house he'd been using as a center of operations. He'd waited another two days to make sure she was gone before going out to hunt Finn.

After all the preparations and angst he'd gone through leading up to the moment he'd shoved the white oak stake through Finn's heart, the simplicity of it had been anti-climactic. Surprise had been on his side, and Finn hadn't even seen him coming. At first, Finn had just looked at the wooden stake sticking out of him with amusement, but then they'd both been shocked when it, and Finn, burst into flames. Finn had died shrieking as the preternatural fire had consumed him and left behind nothing but a pile of ash, and Damon was glad he'd made twelve stakes because the one he'd used had burned up with Finn.

His success had made him euphoric, but his joy was short-lived because he'd no sooner gotten back to his temporary digs when Finn's lover, Sage, had ambushed him. He didn't know how she'd known that he was the one who had staked Finn, and she hadn't been giving him any chance to ask. Their fight had been bitter, and Sage had brought a helper with her, and he'd been certain that he wasn't going to survive the encounter, when both of his attackers had suddenly stopped in their tracks, began choking and vomiting blood, then they'd shriveled up and died just as surely as if he'd staked them. He'd stood in the room, looking at their desiccated corpses, and had gotten a very,  _ **very**_  bad feeling.

He hadn't cared that it was nearly 2 a.m., he'd called Gloria to tell her what had happened, and the witch had promised to look into Sage and her companion's inexplicable deaths. After he'd gotten off the phone, he'd packed up his few belongings – he'd traveled light in those days, and put as much distance between him and Seattle as possible. He hadn't stopped until he'd made it all the way to Denver where he'd stayed under the radar for four days until Gloria had called him back. Her news had been devastating.

All over the world vampires had been dropping dead for no reason. One moment they'd been fine, and the next they would be convulsing and dying shortly thereafter. All of it could be traced back to the night he'd killed Finn, and it looked like the horrible truth was that all the vampires that had died were connected to Finn's bloodline. Kill an Original and all the vampires he had sired, and all those they had sired, died.

After Gloria had dropped her bombshell, he'd drunk himself into a stupor for the next week, and it was in that sorry state that Katherine had found him again. Too far gone and destroyed to care what she thought, he'd spilled the whole sordid tale between drunken sobs. Kill an Original, and all his progeny died with him, and he had a one in four chance of killing the vampire who had sired his line, thus killing himself, his brother, Katherine, and Blondie. Katherine had destroyed him even more when she'd admitted that Klaus was the sire of their bloodline.

It had been over. Everything. All of his plans, all of his dreams of killing Klaus and rescuing Elena and his brother, had been shattered with one truth. They couldn't kill Klaus, and everything he'd done – everything he'd sacrificed – had been for nothing. It was enough for him to let his beast have free reign, and he'd shut everything off.

He'd disappeared off the radar after that. He'd traveled from place to place, never staying in one spot longer than a week. He'd killed when he wanted, fucked who and when he'd wanted, and lived a life completely devoid of any emotional attachment. The next two years had passed in a blur of blood, sex, and violence, until he began to feel the nothingness creeping up on him. He'd almost let it take him, but then Gloria had called to warn him about an attack planned on Elena's life. Apparently, since killing Klaus was impossible for anyone who didn't have a sacred white oak stake, and in fact, the existence of the stakes was a very closely guarded secret – as was the fact that he was the one who had killed Finn, a group of werewolves and vampires had teamed up to plot to kill Elena. Since they couldn't kill Klaus, they would kill the source of the blood that made the hybrids possible.

He didn't ask how Gloria had gotten her information. He had always known that she was a powerful witch, though he had never realized just  _ **how**_  powerful, and she had long ago earned his respect and trust. He went to the abandoned warehouse in San Diego where Gloria had told him the attack was being staged, and he had been surprised to find that he wasn't the only member of the cavalry coming to Elena's defense. There had been a number of Klaus's hybrids, including Lockwood, and, in the melee of fighting and killing, he'd seen both Ric and Jeremy Gilbert so someone had clued them in to the attack as well.

He'd known that he was still  _persona_   _non_   _grata_  with Ric, so he hadn't tried to approach them, but he'd met Jeremy's met eyes from across the killing grounds during the fight. He'd been impressed with the boy's skills. At 19 years old, Junior Gilbert was becoming quite the vampire-killing Jedi under the tutelage of Obi Wan Saltzman, and Damon was proud of him from afar. He'd always known that Jeremy possessed his sister's iron core.

When their eyes had met, he'd seen Jeremy recognize him, but there had been no hate or anger in his expression. The boy had nodded once to him, and he had nodded back, each acknowledging the other, before they had returned to their own fights. He hadn't stayed for the clean-up after it was all over, but he had seen the smoke after the warehouse was set ablaze. He'd done his part by hunting down the stragglers and killing any of the conspirators that had tried to escape.

After the Battle of San Diego, he'd kicked his own ass and gotten himself back under control. He'd been angry with himself for checking out for two years, but he'd needed the break. Now that he was back to giving a shit again, he'd started putting his life back together. He'd decided that Elena was better off where she was considering the circumstances, and obviously Klaus was still very much on the ball where threats to his doppelganger had been concerned. It was still safest to leave Elena with Klaus, and he'd accepted that. Instead, he'd turned to taking care of those who were important to her.

He'd discovered that Junior had applied and had been accepted to NYU, which was where he was attending his freshman year. Damon saw to it that Jeremy received grants and scholarships to pay for his education. When Jeremy had put the Gilbert house up for sale, Damon had bought it through one of the shell companies he owned. He'd also positioned himself through a different shell company to manage the rental of the lake house for Jeremy to give him extra income, and he'd made sure investments for the boy were sound and profitable. No one could say that he hadn't inherited Giuseppe Salvatore's business sense. It was too bad his father had been too busy being disappointed in him to see that.

As for Alaric, Damon had pulled some strings to get him a cushy job at Berkeley in their U.S. History department. He'd kept his eye on his former friend after that, steering his career in subtle ways in the background, making sure he was approved for research grants (funded by one of his shell corps, of course) and on track to make tenure.

He'd even made sure Matt Donovan got a football scholarship to Clemson.

He spent the next three years finding himself again. He'd wasted the first 145 years of his vampire existence pining for his lost love and hating his brother, and the next four either chasing after a girl who couldn't love him or drinking himself into emotionless oblivion. Now for the first time, he had no agenda, no plans to make, no one to hate or chase after. He had eternity and he decided to take some time to rediscover the man he used to be.

As a human he'd loved art and literature, beautiful women and thoughtful men. Had his father not insisted that he come home to join the Confederacy, he would have stayed at university and completed his education. He had liked big ideas and colorful places, and he traveled the world to look at it with new, fresh eyes. He had taken Gloria on a tour of the globe, letting her choose where she had wanted to go and what she had wanted to see. They were even lovers for a brief time until she'd told him that she knew no one would ever hold his heart the way Elena did, and they'd parted as friends and respected allies.

Katherine would find him every now and then, probably at the request of his brother, and he was always glad to see her. He'd accepted her for what she was: someone he had loved deeply and lost to her own selfishness, someone he could only trust as far as their goals coincided, yet someone who knew him, and who he knew well. They'd meet as friends, and he never slept with her again after that night in Seattle. If that bothered her, he couldn't care. She never asked, and he never offered.

She did drop hints that things were not all lovely dovey in Paradise, however. In fact, she'd come right out and told him that Elena and Stefan were not "together." Stefan was with Rebekah, and Rebekah didn't share. At least she didn't share Stefan's heart. If all Elena had wanted from Stefan was sex, she probably could've had that as much as she wanted, but since there was an emotional attachment in the relationship it was verboten. Katherine described the relationship between Rebekah and Elena as strained, but civil. Klaus had declared Elena off-limits to his sister, and Stefan obviously still had strong feelings for her.

As for Elena's feelings for Stefan… Katherine never came right out and said that the Epic Love was no longer so epic, but she did say things about Elena "maturing" and "out growing" her teenaged infatuations. He hoped so because she was approaching 24 years of age.

By the time Klaus's lackey had found him in Italy, he hadn't seen Elena in six years, but he'd made peace with himself and his decisions. He knew that he still loved her, and, if he had known then what he knew now, he would have made different choices, but there was no second-guessing himself and hindsight was always 20/20. He'd made mistakes, but he owned them, just as he owned his pain and took responsibility for it.

He'd become his essential self: thoughtful and fun-loving with the potential to be ruthless and uncompromising. He still loved with everything he had, and kept faith with those who kept faith with him. He still protected those he cared about and killed when he had to, but sometimes he hunted just for the thrill of the chase and the pleasure of the capture of his prey. He wasn't perfect, but he wasn't a monster either. His beast was still very much within him, but he no longer saw it as a separate part of him to be locked away. It had been assimilated into him, always there, taking control when it needed to, but tempered by his rational mind. He felt whole, no longer at war with his nature and his primal side.

He was happy, or as happy as he could expect to be under the circumstances. He wasn't unhappy, and if there was a hole in his heart where Elena used to be, that was his burden to bear. All in all, though, he liked his life, and he hadn't wanted it to be upended.

Needless to say, he wasn't pleased to be disturbed by one of Klaus' minions, not only for the reminder of all he had sacrificed and lost, but also for the missive that he was to leave his cushy, peaceful existence and return to the States posthaste. He'd wanted to cut the messenger's head off and send it back to Klaus tied to a cinder block, postage due, but since the vamp-were hybrid promptly tore off his Daylight charm and immolated himself right in front of Damon, he was denied that pleasure.

He didn't ignore the summons, but he did take his time in responding. He took a few days to settle his affairs in Italy and to say  _arrivederci_  to his lovely signorinas who cried for losing him. He didn't want Klaus to think he was a dog who could be called to heel. In the meantime, he did wonder why Klaus wanted him. The last time Katherine had been to see him he'd noticed that she was under some strain, but he didn't ask her about it, and now he was kicking himself for not following his instincts. She'd said something about Stefan and Elena no longer being on vervain, and he hoped that didn't mean what he thought it did.

He wondered if it was about his killing Finn, but as far as he knew, he and Katherine were the only ones who knew he'd been Finn's killer since Gloria had allowed him to wipe that memory from her mind for her own protection. There had been no other witnesses, although he still didn't know how Sage had known he'd been the one, and he figured that if Klaus knew it was him, he would have been dead a long time ago.

He thought about a lot of things as he boarded a plane that would take him from Europe back to the States, and another that would take him from New York to Chicago. He mulled it over on the long flight between naps, reading, and flirting with the flight attendants in First Class, and he finally came to the conclusion that worrying about it was a complete waste of time. If Klaus wanted him dead, he'd be dead so it had to be something else, and that something else was probably what had been bothering Katherine back in April. If it was bothering Katherine, it most likely involved Stefan and Elena, and he had to be ready to face whatever it was that was going to be thrown at him.

When his plane set down in Chicago, he'd felt an odd sense that he'd come full circle, and it made him uncomfortable. He would always associate the city with the betrayal he had committed there, and he wondered if Klaus had chosen it to deliberately bring back bad memories. He'd been given the address of a house in Lake Forest, but he didn't go there straight away. He knew he'd be a fool to go into Klaus's den unprepared, so he dropped in on Gloria first, only to find her bar closed. That tripped off his alarms because he'd just spoken with her the previous week, and everything had seemed fine.

Dread settled into his stomach as he called her and got her voicemail, but his fears were somewhat alleviated by her message. During their time together, they had worked out a system of code words that would relay vital information within a seemingly bland and innocuous message, and her choice of words told him that she was safe but that there was danger. He remembered that there was a secret compartment in a cabinet behind the bar, so he went to it, tripping the hidden lever and sliding the back panel aside to reveal a lockbox. He pulled it out and placed it on the counter, wondering if it was spelled closed, but he felt the lock click free when he touched the latch so either it wasn't locked at all or it had been keyed to his touch. Either way, he was able to open the lid to reveal the box's contents.

His time with Gloria had made him as much of a warlock as he could be without actually being able to cast magic. Vampires  _ **could**_  use magic, but it was an uncertain thing because undead things using living energy often made the spells go awry. He could, however, mix non-magical potions, and he was a damn good herbalist. He even had a talent for gardening, although he'd gut anyone who'd say anything about it. He did have a reputation to protect, after all.

The box contained one of the sacred white oak stakes he'd given Gloria and a set of cloth pouches filled with herbs. He put the stake aside and examined the pouches, sniffing each one and trying to discern her message. Gloria never wrote anything down. Her letters were written in scent and signs, language another witch would speak… or a witch-savvy vampire. Her herbs would brew two potions – the super charged vervain and another potion meant to keep a clear head and focus the mind, it also somewhat dulled the senses – the sense of smell in particular. She was telling him that he needed to protect himself from compulsion, keep his head on straight, and keep his nose in check. Something was going to trigger his basal instincts, and she was warning him to be ready.

He took her message to heart and brewed both potions. While he was waiting for them to cool, he took off his No Mojo necklace and dipped it into the super-charged vervain. He wasn't relishing what he was about to do, but he didn't want anyone to be able to rip it off his neck. He took a sharp knife, gritted his teeth, and sliced a deep lateral wound in his left pectoral muscle large enough to create a pocket to slip the talisman underneath his flesh. His skin would heal over the pendant, but the vervain would prevent his body from expulsing it. It would sting and burn until he cut it out, but at least he knew he would remain protected from magical influence. When the wound was deep enough, he took the talisman off the chain and used a pair of small ice tongs to shove the black stone underneath his muscle, grunting as it stung and burned and gripping the edge of the bar to fight off the pain until his skin healed over.

When the potions were ready, he drank a thimble-full of the vervain, gagging and choking as it went down, and chased it with a full measure of the other. He didn't like the feeling of having his senses dulled, but he trusted Gloria. He poured some of the super-charged vervain into vials he found under the bar countertop and tucked them into his jacket, but he left the stake in the box as he packed everything up and stored it back in the hidden compartment. He locked the bar behind him as he headed back out to his rental car and drove to the address he'd been given.

The house was a typical Nuevo-riche mansion probably built in the boom years of the eighties, and the security gate closed behind him as he drove up the circular driveway and parked in front of the Georgian columned façade. Elijah opened the door when he rang the bell, and he gave the Original a jaunty smile.

"I'm here," he said.

"I can see that," Elijah replied in his usual cool voice, but there was something in his demeanor that tripped off red sirens in Damon's head.

He tamped it down, resisting the urge to rub the spot on his chest that itched and burned from the talisman under his skin, and stepped into the grand entry.

"My brother and I had a bet on when you would arrive. He thought you would come running as soon as you could, but I believed you would take your time responding," Elijah said, leading the way across the marbled foyer and through a set of open double doors.

"So which of you won and do I get a cut?" he asked with a smirk, using snark to hide his growing agitation.

"I did, and I'll consider it."

They walked into a large sitting room where several people were waiting. He noted Klaus and several of his hybrids. Lockwood was there standing next to Blondie whose eyes lit up when he entered the room, but he saw her quickly lower her gaze. Rebekah was sitting on a high-backed couch with her hand resting possessively on his brother's thigh as Stefan sat uncomfortably next to her. Stefan and he met eyes, seeing each other for the first time since that fateful night, and the emotions that ripped through him were nearly overwhelming. He was glad for Gloria's potion and warning, because he really was almost swept away. The expression in Stefan's eyes showed that he wasn't much better off.

There was another person in the room, one he needed to look at, but he couldn't until he had locked himself down. After several moments, he turned his attention to the woman sitting in the Queen Anne chair next to the couch. She was older, more mature. Her body had filled out, and she'd cut her hair to about shoulder-legnth, but she was still the same. His heart nearly leapt out of his chest, and her name was a prayer on his lips, when he caught a whiff of her scent.

His senses and primal instincts came shrieking to the fore, and his whole body went rigid. There was no mistaking that smell, and she even had the temerity to look guilty as her hand came up to protectively lay on her lower abdomen. His eyes went red, and his fangs came down, and he was at her side in an instant – not to threaten her, but to warn away any rival males who would dare to get too close. The hybrids scattered, and even his brother gave him a wide-eyed, wary look. He locked gazes with Stefan and growled possessively. If his brother had had  _ **anything**_  to do with this…

Damon rounded on Klaus, furious and ready to fight to the death. "What have you done!" he demanded.

The Original flashed him a cocky grin and sauntered over to him even as Damon stepped forward to block his path to Elena.

"Now, now, mate, I think it's obvious what I've done," Klaus answered with a smirk and a gloating look in his eyes. "I decided that it was time for my doppelganger to continue the Petrova line, thus insuring that there will be another doppelganger in a few generations for me to use to make more hybrids."


End file.
